mBox Revisited

G'Day

Last year I was in UK for a while and before I went away PT Bear suggested that I get mBox http://www.somersoft.com/forums/showthread.php?t=42208&highlight=mBox which I did.

mBox is the greatest thing since sliced bread and I really do not know what I did without it.

mBox did a Customer Survey this week, and I said that mBox was wonderful but I often receive mega pages in one fax / pdf file and have to print it out and then refax what I want to myself - lots of information I receive is not appropriate / relevant to send on to lenders

So I end up printing out, say, a 55 page Contract because the Agent has typed something which may be compromising to my Customer or irrelevant to the Application in the Fax Header page.

So mBox have sent me this link http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ and what you do is:

Open the pdf file
Click on 'print' and select 'pdfcreator' as the printer
Select the pages to 'print' to the pdfcreator
and it creates a new pdf file! Just like that! With just the relevant pages!!!

How amazeme!

Obviously, if you receive pdf files as email attachments - or any pdf file where you want to forward just the one page, you can now open the pdf file, save the page in a new file, and send that.

I reckon this one feature will save me a toner cartridge and 10 realms of paper each year.

All Hail mBox!

Cheers
Kristine
 
Yeah, but that's not free. :)

Free is not always better.

I do have quite a few free utilities that I use every day, but I will gladly pay for software that makes my life easier - and I regularly do.
 
Free is not always better.

I do have quite a few free utilities that I use every day, but I will gladly pay for software that makes my life easier - and I regularly do.

Better is relative. :D

Chances are, if you've paid for and been using Microsoft products then you generally have had to pay for software, whether it makes your life easier or not. Your choice has generally been restricted relative to the amount of money you want to hand over for some software.

The last few years has seen an emergence of cloud-based applications such as Google Docs, which are also free, and decouple you from the PC and its software model that is dying. Eventually software-as-a-service will be the only way you can use software, and you pay for it as you use it. Kind of like electricity or gas.

At the end of the day, if you're happy with one product, that's all that matters. :D
 
Yes i love mbox too. My favourite enhancement was when they allowed the fax to be sent to more than one email.
 
I've tried lots of different freeware; I like pdf ReDirect for pdf creation.

I can't believe you've been printing out, Kristine! :eek:

Hi ozperp

Yeah, sad, isn't it!

Sometimes we just get too busy to have time to explore, and keep wearing glasses held together with sticky tape or chewing around the broken tooth.

I just love my computer, recently upgraded the harddrive and had to buy new software, reload everything etc .... but opening pdf files is one of those things that people just don't ever seem to mention. I work with the laptop and the PC at the same time and mBox has been such a boon in handling paperwork. Now that I can edit the file it will all be so much easier again.

Most, but not all, of the lenders now have online applications with supporting documents emailed in to them. When they are all online the paper trail will gradually fade away but I doubt it will ever be no paper.

Cheers
Kristine
 
The last few years has seen an emergence of cloud-based applications such as Google Docs, which are also free, and decouple you from the PC and its software model that is dying. Eventually software-as-a-service will be the only way you can use software, and you pay for it as you use it. Kind of like electricity or gas.

Google docs is a relatively minor example of cloud computing (despite its pervasiveness), and that it is free is quite irrelevant and points more to the commoditisation of office productivity tools than it does to the typical business model for UI based cloud hosted tools.

Most of the powerful cloud based services out there actually used by people for business (CRM applications are some of the best examples), are very much not free, indeed they are typically subscription models - which may or may not be better than the "owned license" model we usually see for desktop applications, depending on your point of view.

Suffice to say that for the average office worker who doesn't do anything terribly sophisticated, UI level cloud computing may well serve them well.

I am very much NOT in that segment of users. I almost never run office productivity tools - that's not what I do.

There are some back-end tasks I already hand off to the cloud ... mBox is a great example - all my inbound and outbound faxing goes through mBox - I haven't sent or received a physical fax in years.

I also use online backup services to provide an additional layer of data security and disaster recovery for my critical data.

While there are already online photo and video editing tools, I very much doubt they will ever replace Photoshop or Premiere (and such) for serious production work. That doesn't make the online tools irrelevant - indeed they serve a very important market segment - but that segment isn't targeted at me or my needs.

For the vast bulk of what I do day-to-day, I need the computing power, control, security, (and reliability) of locally run applications - that is the nature of what I do and I doubt that will ever change.

The world doesn't need to be one extreme or the other, there is room for both - office workers with modest computing requirements can use UI based cloud services, power users and developers will still require locally executed applications.
 
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