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."
Good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's anything like my old office, it's filled with a mixture of people unwilling or unable to learn ANYTHING new. ANYTHING new, no matter how simple.
They learned how to fax stuff when they started in 1987, and that is the way they will do it until they die. And if you try to make them change, they will feign near-catatonic levels of stupidity, throw fits, intentionally sabotage equipment (yep, actually seen it happen), and generally throw up any roadblock they can manage to stand in the way of learning even the simplest new task.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I think you're missing the point.
Re: (Score:2)
You mock those who rely on the "old" paper system and then suggest relying on an long-unsupported proprietary computer architecture from the late 1980's.
I think you're missing the point.
And you're (most likely) using a computer whose CPU's instruction set was based upon a 1970's era computer terminal [wikipedia.org]. Sure, the instruction set and architecture have been extended and modified significantly since then, just as the AS/400 you buy today is much different than the one you bought in 1980.
Re: (Score:3)
The current iSeries machine we have dates to about two years ago. Before that mini we had an older iSeries mini, and before that we had another AS/400 mini. Before that we had a Honeywell, and at some point they had a Wang. These computers have handled employment records, payroll, enrollment records, equ
too bad... (Score:2)
It's too bad that the information in your old office will long outlive the other information lost in the Digital Dark Age.
Re: (Score:2)
Thus example is not important. such organizations either perish, or these workers are replaced.
and if neither occurs, there is nothing to fix.
Re: (Score:3)
And if you try to make them change, they will feign near-catatonic levels of stupidity, throw fits, intentionally sabotage equipment (yep, actually seen it happen), and generally throw up any roadblock they can manage to stand in the way of learning even the simplest new task.
You're lucky. At universities where I've worked, there is a shadow board of decision makers who decree that any new change, such as e-mail, must be mangled together with the old ways. The result is idiotic and more frustrating than had they simply stuck with the old way.
For instance, an accounting software update meant that all employees had to be updated every quarter. You'd think this could be done automatically, but it was decided that in order to make sure employees who had left weren't automatica
Re: (Score:3)
Rather, the managers have to be complicit. After all, if a worker learned how to do things in 1987, then the managers probably did not every have computers in scho
Re: (Score:2)
If it's anything like my old office, it's filled with a mixture of people unwilling or unable to learn ANYTHING new. ANYTHING new, no matter how simple.
In my department we place orders by filling out a requisition and emailing it to our administrative assisstant...who then prints them out and deletes the email to save space.
Re: (Score:3)
He sure it's easy, and don't give them a choice.
They learned faxing, and they can learn not walking to the fax machine and pushing a button on their screen to send a fax.
I have heard your complaint, and seen it proven false over and over again, when people aren't given the choice. Changes takes energy, so natural the brain rebels against it.
If they still don't get it? give them warning, write them up and fire them.
Re: (Score:2)
If it makes you feel better, there is a typewriter not 30 feet from me in the financial department. It is still in active use.
Probably because those non-impact printers are pure shit when it comes to making carbon copies.
BTW, if your response to that is "dur, just print multiple copies," STFU - you don't know enough about finances and/or law.
Re: (Score:2)
dur, why does finances and/or law prescribe an archaic method of multiple copies?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Because changing financial regulations and laws practically requires an act of Congress to accomplish many times, so the old way stands - no matter how repulsively outdated and impractical it is.
If you've ever had someone you were in contract with try and pull a fast one by presenting an altered photocopy of the original agreement, you would not think the practice quite so impractical.
Re: (Score:2)
We just put the legal original on glass and sent out copies.
Worked fine, and this was pretty big financial stuff. 50+million dollar deals... and it was 1998. Reduced staffing needs by about 400 people nation wide.
Re: (Score:2)
So you can't give them "copy number three" which has completely different terms than "copy number one".
If your sole purpose in life was to save trees you'd just get ONE copy notarized by a notary all/both sides trust, then rely on photocopies of the notarized doc, but even with that protocol you can't prove stuff wasn't added or crossed out, unless you had a clause that the contract is invalid if anything is added or crossed out, and you need to notarize each page, which I'm sure the notary is willing to do
Re: (Score:2)
Huh, we do nothing but finance and law here (we're a REIT) and in the six years I've worked here I've NEVER seen anything involving carbon paper, everything is done with multiple copies. Hell some of our deals are done strictly electronically (a depressingly small percentage, but still some are done that way). On the other hand our finance people kill trees like they're going out of style, one floor printed over 4 million pages in 22 months.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, we've asked them, and we've spent quite a few millions of dollars on building them an all electronic workflow system with years of meetings and design sessions and user acceptance training and pilot phases and the only thing it's done is slow the growth in the amount of paper produced. Our reporting vendor has thrown up their hand on multiple occasions because they generate reports so large that the merge engine runs out of memory (which they of course print out, even though no person could possibly rea
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds like it's time to read the actual legal requirements (or lack of) for printing legal docs and avoid re-living the American revolution. My understanding is you need one official copy that is say notarized and if there's any discrepancies with copies of that copy, the original is referenced to resolve. I'm not aware of anything that requires you to make carbon copies of a document anywhere I've worked.
Also there's print
Important documents should be on paper (Score:3)
Important documents should be on paper---for archiving---not faxing.
Too bad nobody wants to get rid of the most worthless use of paper: junkmail and phonebooks.
Of course, the US Government will fight tooth and nail to keep junkmail as a revenue stream for the US Post Office.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/business/seeking-revenue-postal-service-plans-to-deliver-more-junk-mail.html?_r=0 [nytimes.com]
Re: (Score:3)
One year later ...
"Hello? The idiot we replaced you with has lost an entire year worth of documents. We've fired him. Please come back."
Get rid of printers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
There is a lot of truth in this. After my last printer quit I don't have one in my home anymore. If I need to print something I'll go to the office supply store. Usually it is for a work presentation I was going there anyway to get color copies made.
I've not even had to print an invoice in over a year. They are all emailed to clients and the clients I have now I don't have problems getting paid from.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Get rid of printers (Score:5, Informative)
And how many screens? Let's take a typical development task - I've seen two independent people come up with requirement specification, of which a third requirement spec has to be generated (the first is what marketing wants a product to do, the second is what engineering wants the product to do, the third is what your little chunk of the entire project is supposed to do).
And from that, distill a test plan which has a requirements matrix that ties back to both original documents and the distilled document (tracability - every feature listed must be testable and tested).
Oh, and the first two documents change. A lot. It may be a numbering change, but that means all the documents need to change to adapt, and ensuring that it all matches up again, so you have to have all 4 documents open at once. Short of having four monitors to view them all simultaneously, it's a alt-tab nightmare.
Toss in a fifth document (say, documentation on your chunk - like how stuff interfaces), and now you have to also ensure your interface headers are up to date as well, AND ensure your requirements doc is still complete to have that document integrated into it (and testable!).
Oh, and that notepad? Paper. So you have to have notepad.exe open as well.
And I have been known to be the assinine QA tester who would chew out a developer if their tests weren't up to snuff. Not because it made me happy, but because I understood the value of ensuring that everything matched up. If you omit a step, I'd call you out because the next person who runs the test may not know that and mark a fail on something that should've passed.
Complete tracability and repeatability - when that software goes out the door, I can say the test plan met the requirements, point out how it matched up, and that if someone else took the same build out of code control and same version of the documents, they can repeat the same tests and have the same results. Because 6 months down the road, someone will ask "did we test this?" and "How did we test this?" and "Customer says it doesn't work". In which case I can either say - "oops, we didn't htink to test it" (new requirement and test case), or "oops, we didn't know the customer wanted it this way" (new requirement), or "yes we did, and here's how ew did it, and I can run it again to double-check". (Maybe customer got an engineering build and it failed because of a regression).
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
This is why computers have interfaces with overlapping windows, and good computers have interfaces with virtual desktops. The workflow is pretty simple. Open all your documents on desktop 1. Move them one at a time to desktop 2. On desktop 2, take the notes you need and classify them appropriately. When done, move them to desktops 3 or 4(or 5 or 6) depending on how you classified them. You can add as many desktops as you need to simulate as many stacks as you need.
Re: (Score:2)
People can acquire paper, but a printer is too expensive.
Re: (Score:2)
People can acquire paper, but a printer is too expensive.
I can go to the local uni bookstore and buy a printer for less than $50. True, that's more expensive than the paper I can pick up from the local copy room stock for nothing, but hardly an expense that would make one unobtainable.
Re: (Score:2)
Where are you buying your printers?
If a department wanted to violate the no printers rule they could do it with petty cash, I don't think the cost of a printer is even remotely a barrier here.
Re: (Score:2)
Where are you buying your printers?
If a department wanted to violate the no printers rule they could do it with petty cash, I don't think the cost of a printer is even remotely a barrier here.
The cost of a printer is trivial these days. The cost of ink cartridges isn't, especially 'smart cartridges' that yell for replacement when they still have about 25% capacity left in them.
It's usually cheaper to replace the whole printer than it is the ink cartridge.
Re: (Score:2)
That's exactly the point...
If a department or a small part of a department decided to break the rules and acquire a printer, they wouldn't bother with one that needs fancy expensive cartridges, they'd just buy a few $20 printers and toss them out.
Acquisition of printers isn't a barrier, because they are so cheap that the exact behaviour you describe is possible.
In fact, if they were violating a 'no printers' rule then replacing the cheap printers regularly would be the best approach, as they would lack tech
Re: (Score:2)
Where are you buying your printers?
If a department wanted to violate the no printers rule they could do it with petty cash, I don't think the cost of a printer is even remotely a barrier here.
You could block their ability to add a new printer to their system, which would prevent them from printing unless they used a printer that prints from USB drive (which you could also block). You can also prevent them from plugging a printer into the network and/or using a Wifi enabled printer with appropriate network tools.
I call... (Score:5, Insightful)
... bullshit. 10,000 pages a year? Even if you count every page of every book and all the toilet paper I wipe my arse with it would be a fraction of that.
I'm all for saving paper, but this kind of exaggeration isn't very helpful. It's like the old one about plastic bags having an average lifetime of less than three minutes, which seems to ignore the fact that most people use them as bin liners.
Beware the ecological fallacy (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
But an average of 10,000 sheets for all office workers? Unless there are a few producing several billion pages a year by themselves to account for all the office workers who produce hardly any it just doesn't add up.
Re: (Score:2)
and three people in my office go through a box of 5000 pages every 3 weeks.
Of course we are printing invoices, and order fulfillment sheets, but they all get printed.
We are getting a new CRM, ERP software which should allow us to go mostly paperless.(figure cut down by 2/3rds) however that is going to cost us $100,000 in software, and who knows how much else in training fees.
In the end it will be worth it as we can streamline other areas of operations. and we ditch a giant headache of ERP system that we ar
Re: (Score:2)
We are getting a new CRM, ERP software which should allow us to go mostly paperless.(figure cut down by 2/3rds) however that is going to cost us $100,000 in software, and who knows how much else in training fees.
In the end it will be worth it as we can streamline other areas of operations. and we ditch a giant headache of ERP system that we are currently dealing with.
Wow! I really enjoy your positive attitude. I wish I had the same outlook.
Based on my experience I'd say that what you're really going to end up with is: the same or more paper, one partially used CRM system, two incompatible ERPs and a smaller bonus as the $100,000 sales estimate starts drifting toward the $500,000-$1M range as more and more consultants are frantically brought in to save someone's career aspirations.
Like I said, I wish I had the same outlook as you, but I don't.
Re: (Score:2)
... bullshit... It's like the old one about plastic bags having an average lifetime of less than three minutes, which seems to ignore the fact that most people use them as bin liners.
Yup. I'm just waiting for one of the filthy tree-huggers at the "health food" store (i.e., carries hippie food and fresh local stuff, as opposed to BigBoxMart's generic, shipped-in-from-lord-knows-where crap), who give me the stink-eye every time I ask for plastic bags, to mouth off and give me the opportunity to point that little factoid out.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
10,000 a year is an absolutely bogus exaggeration of a number for the average office worker; that's 30 pieces of paper per worker being used up every single day of the year. Maybe law offices, or education centers use higher volumes because of the nature of the busines
Re: (Score:2)
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]
Re: (Score:2)
About 30 pages per day? (Score:3)
I'm not accepting customer purchase orders, receiving order acknowledgments or sending/receiving invoices, you know - the kind of stuff most office workers do every minute of every day.
From that perspective - and also from looking around at different desks in the office - I would say 30 pages per day is a pretty conservative estimate.
Re: (Score:2)
When I still worked in IT for a small financial company, I had to make sure tens of thousands of sheets of paper were printed daily for just our little company (50 or so). (Much of it reports that would be stored for N years, never looked at and then shredded. Aren't hard copy retention policies wonderful?)
So, it might be a pretty reasonable estimate when averaged over less paper intensive companies.
Project Paperless LLC (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Project Paperless LLC (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's never printed, then it can't be scanned.
Interaction with other businesses (Score:2)
project paperless? (Score:3)
I barely print anything now... (Score:2)
With the exception of one recent and unusual project, I typically print out at most a few sheets of paper per year for work and this has been true for years, with the added bonus of never having to understand how my clients' printers "work".
I'm still working through (ie recycling) a sheaf of old printouts from yesteryear for my small hand-written to-do lists. Even including that I can't imagine that I use even (say) 100 sheets of A4 per year.
Doesn't stop other people printing stuff out and giving it to me
Heard that one before: (Score:3)
You remember when they told us about the "paperless office" the last time round?
They lied!
Re: (Score:2)
There was a story last year [slashdot.org] about how digitizing industrial-plant blueprints in the 1990s "paperless office" push worked out for 'em...
Times have changed (Score:2)
It will be a while before paperless business is common, but eventually it is going to happen. Printing things costs money, and a
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:I think I might mind (Score:4, Insightful)
This is so true.
Going paperless for the sake of paperless is dangerous. Going paperless because you have the technology (and user interface) to do so, and you think you have something to gain (such as increased simplicity, search capability, archival ease, etc) -- then there's a reason.
Yep (Score:3)
It's just a scam to get people to scan documents and email them so they can get sued...
What about Junkmail? (Score:2)
Would it be a bit more appropriate to get rid of junkmail and phonebooks first?
Some offices REQUIRE hard copies of things. Junkmail and phonebooks have short-lived usefulness (if at all) and waste tremendous amounts of other resources (like the postman driving around to very postbox and delivering it.)
Re: (Score:2)
Would it be a bit more appropriate to get rid of junkmail and phonebooks first?
USPS RecycleDirect (tm).
The new USPS RecycleDirect service diverts all bulk direct mail advertising addressed to you or your residence directly from the sending post office to a recycling center. You never see another piece of junk mail. Sign up today!
(No, the USPS doesn't really offer that. They should.)
Re: (Score:2)
Legal documents (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, legally-required documents are one of the biggest reasons to go paperless.
Take a document that needs to be signed off by 3 approvers in 3 different locations, and produced on demand for 15 years. Now imagine that in the course of just a single project you produce 100 of these annually.
With a document management system that supports electronic signatures you can handle review/revise/approval cycles with fairly little latency, and your documents are all classified away before they're signed off, wh
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, that was a big battle at work, but we eventually got through it for the most part. Once you can set a precedent it gets a lot easier. It really is just conservatism.
I remember somebody even trying to block the use of FAXed signature pages (this is in the last 10 years). I pointed out that if our company continued to operate so inefficiently we'd end up being bought out, and the agreement of sale would no doubt involve a FAXed signature. FAX signature pages have been used for all kinds of legal doc
Consider the legal issues... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They don't have to, if you're careful. All files should be tagged with retention dates and purged when no longer required. Backups should also be discarded after a retention period - you shouldn't be running incremental backup sets back to the dawn of time.
If anything you're far more likely to effectively dispose of documents if they're electronic. Who knows what you have lying around in some filing cabinet...
Re: (Score:2)
Who knows what you have lying around in some filing cabinet...
Who knows what files you have laying about on a stack of floppies you can't even read anymore? Or how many files that disgruntled employee was able to take home on that nearly microscopic microSD card...
5 years ago? B.S. (Score:4, Informative)
I have been doing document management systems for 15 years and we were implementing paperless signing even in 1997. There's nothing new today that wasn't around and underused.
There's a significant cost per document type to create electronic versions and integrate it into a proper workflow. This doesn't have a ROI on low volume types.
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, Funny)
Can we all just standardize and get along?
That's "standardise."
Re: (Score:2)
Standardization is nice, but it requires either hard work or tyrannical power.
Not to belittle the work that our tyrants do for us.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
You mentioned the relevant standards already: email
Yes, isn't email such a wonderful, universal standard?
My main non-work email is on a shell account under linux. My main work email is under Evolution on linux. I routinely get things as attachments to my non-work email that I have to forward to work and then save to disk so I can access them using Word or Adobe Reader on my Windows system, because OO or xpdf or evince can't quite handle that format properly. And lots of things to my work email that only bypass the forwarding step.
I especially love the p
Re: (Score:2)
Not to mention the increasing number of standards-abusing websites tha
10,000 Pages!? (New Tool Album) (Score:2)
What now? (Score:2)
...the average office worker uses about 10,000 sheets of paper each year, ...
Seriously? I used less than 500 sheets (one ream) for both home and office last year - seriously. Now, my wife (of 20 years) was a teacher and routinely used much more - which we bought ourselves because her school only allocated one 500-sheet ream to each teacher, for the entire school year (I digress) - but she still used less than 10,000 sheets/year. She died on Jan 13, 2006 (of a brain tumor, just seven weeks after diagnosis) and I still have a 1/2 full box of paper at home. Sigh.
expense reports may stil have to deal with paper r (Score:2)
expense reports may still have to deal with paper receipts, 3rd party's that may want a fax or there own format.
Paper = Insurance (Score:3)
paper job applications need to go (Score:2)
As some there big issues are under / over sized fields.
Booklet mode (Score:2)
Kindle-like screens (Score:2)
We're still missing Kindle-like screens that can display text without beaming your eyes with light.
Oh right... (Score:2)
...it's not as if Google, HelloFax, and Expensify stand to gain from a paperless office or anything like that. Oh look, there's this little thing called sustainable forestry [ny.gov] that ensures a renewable resource like trees is managed properly to (gasp!) provide paper to the masses and a natural resource for visitors.
Newsflash: (Score:2)
In other news, water is wet and China is full of Chinese people. Film at 11.
Yeah, well, buy me a decent screen (Score:2)
I work for the government and print thousands of pages a month.
I am not reading all that (and yes, I have to read it all) on low-DPI crap monitors that are issued to me, and nobody in my department has any power to change right on up.
Until I have a 30" high DPI display at work - like I have at home - my eyes will be reading off the printed page.
Give me these tools and we have a deal (Score:3)
1. Something to replace the paper notebooks I use to keep extemporaneous notes in. It needs to be relatively free-form, as quick to input as a scribble with a pen, and need not be indexed, merely stored. It does need to allow me to flip through pages quickly, showing me the whole page in a flash and letting me swipe through. Indexing and conversions are Phase Two.
2. Something to let me view multiple pages of a document simultaneously, alongside one another. Easily repositioned.
Before we go further, what I want will require multiple monitors and a tablet. The monitors will not kill trees, but their overall eco cost will be at least as much as paper, I suspect.
Also, that notebook replacdement will probably be a tablet. It needs to be secure, within the corporate environment, and also afford full security when detached om the network. In fact, it needs to be autonomous. My current solution, paper notebooks, are a physical security issue. Since this new gizmo will have to be with me, biometrics are the security solution, and needs to give me access as fast as flipping a page. Ok, 2 seconds.
Also, I work for a financial institution. Security is a little higher than important, but not as high as military.
What I want is Surface as a desktop, along with a traditional monitor-based workspace. Just make my desk a big Surface device, add in the 'Minority Report' UI, and I can ditch paper for good, though I doubt I kill more than 3,000 pages a year. Assuming I can write on my new Surface surface, drop things, and spill coffee on the edges, all is good.
Maybe 2015. Maybe no. Sharp or Samsung or whoever is making the flecible displays are close to somethign that would work cleverly, but I am constrained by patent applications from going further. Suffice to say there are a LOT LOT LOT more patents to be filed.
Papers please (Score:2)
I am not at all impressed with the current state of electronic communications and I especially am not impressed by fronts with skin in the game who want you to pay them to do shit that should be accomplished between peers over an IP network for free.
Email is a sad pathetic sorry useless joke. If it is not the endless stream of junk mail it is legitimate messages being silently discarded by some crazy baysian monster. When you do get a message you take a leap of faith assuming the sender is actually who yo
Paperless (Score:2)
Paper Trails cut both ways (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Well 3. is out without 3.2 a full local backup.
Your host could be raided by the police at any time (since some of their other customers may be doing things that someone thinks may be illegal).
Re: (Score:2)
One particular problem I see is viewing multiple documents in a workspace simultaneously (e.g. a mosiac of paperwork on one's desk)
I have found the amount of stuff I print has dropped by an order of magnitude every time I add another computer and/or monitor to my desk. I've got 4 now at home and never print anything anymore.
At work I've only got 3, and once in a while I'll have to print out something complicated to compare to the three screens.
I used to automatically start my projects by printing out electronic component datasheet PDFs so I could examine a couple of them while at the same time screwing around with the CAD and simulati
Re: (Score:2)
I've told them no, filled out the documents with the text adding tool in MSPaint and used a mouse to make a signature and emailed it back.
They had no complaints, and if a complete idiot like myself can do this, they yes, it
Re: (Score:2)
"digital" signatures don't cut it.
Probably because they are too hard to forge and are based on terrifying mathematics instead of "common sense."
the crappy (landscape only) monitors we have.
Really? I know people who rotate their monitors 90 degrees. This is a non-issue at this point.
Big $$$ to fix those issues.
No kidding. Major shifts in how people do things require major investments.
Re: (Score:2)
This is an application for NFC.
Security factors:
Something you have.
Something you know.
Something you are.
Any two of the three often works. A chip and my thumbprint, Chip and my PIN, lots of ways to do that. We use an encryption plugin for Outlook here that relies on my login credentials. My laptop has an NFC reader. And a fingerprint scanner. Lots of ways.
EDI has, however, has been doing this for a few decades I think. We buy crap every day with no more than a card and a fey keypresses. This is not imp
Re: (Score:2)
To do that every employee would at least need a *decent* graphics tablet. And no, for things where a signature is needed, you need a real signature. "digital" signatures don't cut it.
Bullshit. That hasn't been true for 10 years. Every state in the U.S., and all of the EU, and the UK, have legislation enabling electronic signatures and making them as binding as physical signatures.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure the reason that chalkboards/whiteboards exist is that, in fact, there are adequate (and in cer
Paperless fax is useful (Score:2)