Paper fry!

Mobile devices are finally helping realise a promise that PCs failed to fulfill for 40 years — the lurch towards an almost paperless world

Forty years ago this week, an article in BusinessWeek magazine titled ‘The Office of the Future’, proposed a radical shift: to the paperless office. It suggested boldly, that in 20 years, most records in offices would have gone digital. They got it wrong. Even after twice the predicted time span, we are only lurching towards a less-paper world. But the tipping point has come and the mobile phone has done it.

Millions of phone and phablet owners are asking: I can get the books I read as e-books; the movies I view as e-movies. Then why am I forced to fill forms often at clinics, to deposit a cheque, to buy or sell property? We can’t clear the paper jam in a day but we can reduce the burden of filling and often changing. Recent editions to some popular document management solutions, promise to let you create, review, approve, sign and track documents. The leader here has been Adobe’s Acrobat, the most widely-used tool to create and read PDF. Adobe has reimagined Acrobat and made it part of what it now calls the Document Cloud.

And since Adobe is the author of Photoshop, it has morphed its functions with the new DocumentCloud or DC version of Acrobat. I have been trying it out for a few weeks and it is truly uncanny how swiftly you can snap a photo of any document, save it to the cloud as a PDF, edit it, match font to the original or change it or replace the photo — even sign it and password-protect it — all from a mobile device. The signature part is a new addition to Acrobat, because DC now includes another Adobe tool, called eSign.

A feature of DC is mobile link which lets you access the same documents as you move from desktop to laptop to phone. The other new addition to the DC avatar of Acrobat is ‘Fill and Sign’ which makes form filling very easy.

The full versions of Acrobat DC are priced — from around Rs 800 per month to a perpetual licence that can set you back Rs 30,000 and more. As before the Acrobat reader alone is free. But you can also download for free, a combo of three Android or iOS apps:

Adobe Acrobat DC Mobile:

Allows you to open and view PDFs, add comments, organise pages, and create PDFs from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.

Adobe Fill & Sign allows you to turn digital files or paper documents into forms you can fill, sign, and send electronically

Adobe eSign Manager DC, lets you e-sign documents and forms.

— IndiaTechOnline

There’s also a desi option

Zoho, India’s own office productivity solutions leader, has just launched Zoho Forms — a cloud-based app that lets lay users create and share mobile and web forms capturing user data — like customer registrations, orders, surveys, and responses. They can then store it in the cloud, making it available from any device when ever they choose.

You can fill the forms offline and conveniently sync them with the cloud later, when the device has Internet access. Zoho Forms is free for a single user, for up to three forms and there are various plans from $10 to $50 month for corporate and professional users.

Source | Asain Age | 27 July 2015