Campaign To Remove Paper From Offices 285
An anonymous reader writes "A campaign started by HelloFax, Google, Expensify, and others has challenged businesses to get rid of physical paper from their office environment in 2013. According to the EPA, the average office worker uses about 10,000 sheets of paper each year, and the Paperless 2013 project wants to move all of those documents online. HelloFax CEO Joseph Walla said, 'The digital tools that are available today blow what we had even five years ago out of the water. For the first time, it's easy to sign, fax, and store documents without ever printing a piece of paper. It's finally fast and simple to complete paperwork and expense reports, to manage accounting, pay bills and invoice others. The paperless office is here – we just need to use it.' The companies involved all have a pretty obvious dog in this fight, but I can't say I'd mind getting rid of the stacks of paper HR sends me."
Take care if you do. You could get sued by trolls. (Score:5, Interesting)
Patent trolls want $1,000â"for using scanners
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/patent-trolls-want-1000-for-using-scanners/ [arstechnica.com]
Project Paperless LLC (Score:4, Interesting)
Beware the ecological fallacy (Score:4, Interesting)
I think I might mind (Score:5, Interesting)
In theory I'd agree, but in practice so far these have been replaced, in my experience, with things that are even worse than receiving stacks of paper:
1. Far too many emails.
2. Online systems that are damn near impossible to use. As an example, the former system we used for hiring was that I got a stack of resumes with cover letters, on paper, in my internal mailbox. The paperless system we have moved to, "HR Manager" [hr-manager.net], through some combination of its design and/or our HR department's configuration of it, results in me needing to click through about 6 menus and select a bunch of options just to see the list of people who applied for a position. And then more if I want to actually download PDFs of their resumes and cover letters.
Re:Beware the ecological fallacy (Score:4, Interesting)
...or law offices where it's all about the production of paper.
Some fields are just heavy on the documentation. Takei style hysterics aren't going to solve anything.
I'm all for it ... HOWEVER we need... (Score:5, Interesting)
Can we all just standardize and get along?
Re:I'm all for it ... HOWEVER we need... (Score:5, Interesting)
Can we all just standardize and get along?
You mentioned the relevant standards already:
Imagine a world where instead, you dealt with:
So really, be glad that the worst of your problems is that one company uses PDF, another encrypts the PDF, another encrypts the email, and another makes you go to a website on the Internet. We could live in a much worse world.
Paper Trails cut both ways (Score:4, Interesting)