Oval Solutions Articles

Archive for May, 2010

The Importance of Using Tags

May 20th, 2010

Millions of people use computers the world over every day. Millions of e-mails are sent each day. People use their computers for holding their music files, photographs and sometimes large volumes of other information. With all this electronic information, it becomes important to be able to find files or e-mails quickly. Using tags, or labels, can help you achieve this efficiently.

All e-mail clients have options available for sorting and finding messages. You may be able to use keywords in the subject or other parts of the message to direct your e-mail client to put the message in a particular folder. In Microsoft Outlook, for example, you can create physical folders and set up rules to have all your messages automatically organized for you. Microsoft Outlook also has ‘Search Folders’ which are virtual folders. The messages appear to be in a folder, but a physical folder does not exist. Using a Search Folder, you can not only file your e-mail messages according to a keyword in the subject, you can also use different search criteria to retrieve them, such as the name of the person who sent it. E-mail messages can also be sent to more than one virtual folder.

The free web-based inbox.com, as well as popular e-mail programs like Microsoft Outlook, allow the user to use labels and colors to organize mail. You can create as many labels as you like and associate colors with them. Multiple labels can be assigned to messages. Once you have created a label you can find all messages that have that label simply by clicking on the label in the Email labels box.

Messages are not the only items that you want to be able to organize and find quickly. Finding the files that you want on your computer can also be a chore as the number of directories and folders increases. Google Desktop can make searching your computer as easy as doing a search on the web. With Google Desktop you can do a full text search of your e-mail, music, photographs, files, chats, web pages and more. You don’t have to manually organize your bookmarks, e-mails or files. Once you install Google Desktop, it automatically indexes the e-mail, files and web history stored on your computer. Depending on how much data you have this can take a long time, but the indexing is only done once and it only runs when your computer has been idle for more than 30 seconds. This ensures it does not have an impact on anything that you might be doing. Once the index has been created, it is updated every time you receive a new e-mail, browse a new web page, or update a file. You can then use the search box to find items such as files and the search will return the most relevant items. You can also restrict the search to certain types of items, such as files only.

Almost all file systems keep metadata on files. The metadata may be held in directory entries, specialized structures such as inodes or the name of the file. Metadata may be timestamps or bit modes or it can be more specialized information. With more complicated metadata it becomes possible to search for files using the contents of the metadata. Examples of such facilities are the UNIX find utility, Apple Mac’s Spotlight, and Instant Search in Windows Vista which allows you to tag your files by creating custom properties. Tags in the metadata can help you to quickly search whole libraries of documents.

Internet browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer allow you to create bookmarks which you can organize in folders, thus making it easier to find your favorite sites. Some browsers also use tags to organize the bookmarks. For example, Firefox allows you to quickly find your favorite sites by entering the bookmark name, tag or page in the location bar. The more you use the tags the more Firefox will be able to adapt to your preferences. Firefox has an extension called Bookmark Tags. When you create a bookmark, rather than file it in a folder, you give it a tag and Bookmark Tags then files it for you. When you want to find the bookmark, you use the tag rather than looking through folders and subfolders.

If you have a lot of icons on your desktop, you can use the icon name as a tag to quickly find an icon. For example, if you want to find an icon called ‘test,’ click on any icon and press ’t.’ Pressing ‘t’ multiple times will find all the icons beginning with ‘t.’

Now is the time to get organized and remember to put that entry into the subject line of your e-mail.  Such a small step can make your life much easier if a problem arises and you need to find that relevant e-mail quickly.

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Want to go paperless?

May 6th, 2010

The issue of climate change is frequently in the news. People are being encouraged to save resources by either changing the way they do things or by recycling. Organizations are also being encouraged to improve the way they work in order to save resources.

All organizations have traditionally kept a lot of paper records due to legal and regulatory requirements. A wide range of records need to be held by companies, ranging from employment records to transactional records. All this paper has to be kept, some for a prescribed number of years. However, there is growing evidence that organizations are moving to a paperless office. The advantages are – huge savings due to a reduction in storage requirements, easier retrieval of information, and reduced costs in locating relevant records.

Document scanning, internet and intranet sites, and electronic storage can all make the retrieval of information far cheaper and easier than paper records. Although there are certain documents such as VAT records or court documents that companies need to hold as paper copies for legal reasons, companies can still significantly reduce their reliance on paper records. Introducing a document management system can provide huge benefits to a business. A document management system refers to a range of systems designed to manage electronic files and paper that includes tools for converting paper records into electronic files. Some of the benefits of such systems are:

  • Cost – The main benefit of a paperless office is a reduction in cost. It can take up to five minutes to retrieve and replace a paper document. If an employee accesses 10 files each day, that represents 216 hours per year. If the employee is being paid $20 per hour, the cost is $4320 per year just for walking around fetching files. If the employee were able to access the documents from a desk, costs would be cut immediately.
  • Space – converting rooms into areas for storing paper files is an expensive use of office space. Storing documents electronically could help to free up the space to be used more productively.
  • Security – documents held electronically are more secure and there is also better disaster recovery protection. Document management systems are the best way for a company to ensure that it complies with strict record keeping and security rules.
  • Environment – reducing the amount of paper that a company uses improves its green credentials. The average office worker will use up to 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year. The USA alone uses 30 percent of the world’s paper. You may think that paper is cheap, but the costs of using paper can be up to 13 to 31 times the initial cost of the paper itself. Citigroup, which is a large financial services company, has estimated that if each of its employees saved just one sheet of paper per week, the company would save $700,000 each year.

Document scanners, such as the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500, convert paper documents into electronic files at the touch of a button. The scanner is easy to use and the automatic features ensure that the final scans will look their best. All of this can be achieved without any operator intervention. Documents can be scanned at 20 pages per minute even with resolutions as high as 200 or 300 dpi grayscale or color. Intelligent paper feed detection helps prevent misfeeds. With the interactive interface, users can bypass intentional double-feeds. The software provides users with a menu so they can choose to load documents into editing software such as Microsoft Excel or Word. Password protection and digital ids can be added to protect personal and confidential data. Users can embed keywords and searchable content and distribute to e-mail or SharePoint.  Documents can be quickly and easily converted into PDF’s as well, which offers a low file size, high resolution, and searchable text all in one.

Contact Oval Solutions today to learn more about how your office can go paperless.  Call us at (517) 902-7851.

To purchase a great document scanner, click here:
Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 PA03586-B005 Sheet-Fed Duplex Scanner

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