aaronsimmons, Author at Marketing, content, & technology to help printers sell more printing

About a month ago, our entire company completed the popular DISC analysis to help improve our interpersonal communications and grow as a team. On Wednesday, we shut off the phones for a company-wide meeting to learn more about what our DISC profiles mean. For those of you who may not know, one aspect of the DISC personality test stresses the importance of understanding what makes your coworkers tick — and more importantly, what might tick them off! By speaking to each other in ways that best account for how we process information, we can communicate more effectively, work more harmoniously, and get more done with less mistakes due to miscommunication. Of course, we’ve already been working together effectively, harmoniously and with rare miscommunication…this process just helps us do that even better. So we had some good laughs and some good food. Then, most importantly, we got back to work serving you.

We sent out the first edition of the new Printer@Work 2.0 today. Overall, it went well, but with one big error: we have become aware of several issues of the newsletter delivered with broken links. Links that should be going to pages on your own website appear to have been randomly associated with other sites in our database! Here’s what we know so far: Printer@Work 1.0 is unaffected. All Printer@Work 2.0 issues set to basic delivery are affected. (Printer@Work 2.0 custom issues are not affected.) The broken links are the “Send this article to a friend” links and the “Click here to visit the Ideas Collection” link. Navigation links, Fun@Work links and the subscribe / unsubscribe links function as expected. We are still in the process of working out a plan for mitigating this issue. Since this involves email, the links in the emails that have already been sent cannot be updated. We are in the process of working to develop the best redirect strategy that we can, so that when users click the link going to the wrong site, we redirect them to the correct site (ideally), or anywhere else but another printer’s website. Please accept our most profound

Here’s some good news for our current Level 1 website customers looking to upgrade, as well as those who’ve upgraded from a Level 1 site in the past: All Orders Can Now Be Reordered On Level 2 and Level 3 websites, customers have always been able to place reorders for their document library items. However, orders placed using the Place an Order, Request Estimate, Send File and JobReady order forms on your Level 1 website could not be reordered because they were incompatible with the new system. But thanks to some updates to our system, it is now possible to allow your customers to reorder any orders that were placed on your Level 1 site, no matter what order form they used. This is just one more way to make it fun and easy for your customers to buy printing from you. By Request This process requires some heavy lifting, so it’s not automatically part of your upgrade. But if you’d like us to open up all of your previous orders for reordering, just let us know. There is no cost for doing so. Already upgraded your website? That’s not a problem. We can still convert your order history to

Scheduled Maintenance We’ve received word from our technology partner that the DesignEdit servers will be getting an operating system update. Therefore, the DesignEdit tool will be temporarily unavailable March 15th, beginning at 6 AM GMT (that’s 1 AM Eastern, Midnight Central, 11 PM Mountain, 10 PM Pacific). The technicians anticipate the updates will take around 4 hours. Thank You For Your Patience We know it can be an inconvenience to have software unavailable for any length of time, and would like to thank you in advance for your patience.

This is a special announcement for our Canadian customers: we’ve now added Canadian sales taxes to the Level 3 Website’s ecommerce suite! This update to the sales tax calculator is a major piece of the ecommerce puzzle for our Canadian customers, adding another tool to help make it easy for their customers to buy printing. This feature operates the same way as it does for sales taxes in the United States. All you need to do is go to the taxes section in your Control Center and click the Province that you are to charge sales taxes for, and the calculator will do the rest! For more information, please see the “Setting the Tax Rate section” of our Knowledgebase article, 08 – Pricing.

Printer@Work 2.0 Is On The Way When we introduced the Level 2 and Level 3 websites, we knew it was time for the Printer@Work newsletter to get a face-lift. Printer@Work has had the same basic design for…well, for as long as any of us can remember! It’s served us well, but it’s showing its age. Have you ever had one of those projects that you keep wanting to do, but can’t seem to get to because even more important projects keep springing up? In our case, that’s been the Printer@Work project. But the wait is almost over! In March, we’ll be releasing the new and improved Printer@Work. In the meantime, here’s a sneak peak so you can see what’s coming: On The Road We’re going to be at the National Print Owners Association 2014 Annual Owners Conference next week in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Be sure to stop in and say “Hello” — it’s always a nice change of pace to speak to our customers in person!

Jason’s Many Lunch Adventures We thought it would be fun to include you in a curious phenomenon at our office: Jason from our support team has an uncanny ability to get delayed during his lunch time! We’d think he was making it up, because the reasons he gives are sometimes just too crazy. But since we can see the main road to our building, we’ve actually witnessed several of these things taking place right outside our window! Here’s a sampling of the things that have conspired to keep Jason from getting back from lunch so far: A funeral procession Another funeral — during a blizzard A flock of geese crossing the street A guy chasing his dog in the middle of traffic An extra-long flatbed semi delivering a wind turbine blade, stuck at a corner and blocking 4 lanes of traffic A house blocking all traffic (It was being moved out of a flood-prone area.) But Jason hasn’t seen everything yet. He expects to be blocked by the following in the near future: The Fargo Marathon A zombie attack An alien invasion A giant robot battle A Russian paratrooper sneak-attack Perhaps we should start an office pool on what the

The Way Things Were For several years, our websites included a feature that allowed you to activate privacy features on PDFs that would automatically turn off your customers’ ability to print PDFs sent to them through your website. This way, printers could be confident that unscrupulous customers couldn’t take a PDF proof they receive and either print it themselves or bring it to another printshop to have it printed. This was a helpful feature in its time, but unfortunately appears to have run its course. It’s come to our attention that there is a conflict between newer versions of Adobe Acrobat and this site feature. The software we are currently using to do this can be upgraded, but at a cost that is prohibitive for our purposes. And frankly, it’s redundant, because Adobe Acrobat Professional has provided the ability to set printing restrictions for several years now. Going Forward Therefore, we are discontinuing this feature imminently. We have conducted an internal study and found this affects approximately 60 printshops, and we’ll be contacting those printshops over the following week. With this change, you will need to manually assign permissions for the files you send out. Adobe Acrobat Professional has the

Scheduled Maintenance We’ve received word from our technology partner that the DesignEdit system will be undergoing some significant updates to the database. They have managed to perform nearly all of the updates while still keeping the system active, but there are some processes that much be installed while the system is inaccessible. Therefore, the DesignEdit tool will be unavailable on Febrary 1st, beginning at 8 AM GMT (that’s 3 AM Eastern, 2 AM Central, 1 AM Mountain, Midnight Pacific). The technicians anticipate the updates will take around 6 hours. Thank You For Your Patience We know it can be an inconvenience to have software unavailable for any length of time, and would like to thank you in advance for your patience. Fortunately, these kinds of updates are a once-every-5-years kind of thing.

The Power of “Us” One of our favorite things about the DesignEdit product is that most of its content is crowdsourced. The images and template designs that you see are developed by a global team of content providers, all competing to produce the best designs for you and your customers. But here’s where the true power of crowdsourced content can be seen… Earlier this month, during a discussion with our DesignEdit technology partner, we mentioned that there was an unacceptably low number of templates available for banners. (By “low” we meant next to nothing!) And now, after only a few weeks, DesignEdit is flooded with new banner designs! There are already over 200 banner designs online, and the number continues to grow! Time To Dive In If you haven’t tested DesignEdit yet, now is the perfect time to give it a try. We have a Knowledgebase article that can help you start off on the right foot, and our helpful support team will be happy to work with you directly to answer any questions you might have, as always. Just call us at 1-800-736-0688, or send your question to CustomerCare@MarketingIdeasForPrinters.com.

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