It’s The New Year & New Things

In the past I have gone on about Mesh and Live at Microsoft however yesterday I found something new that I think is, or can be, awesome in addition to these services, FedEx Office Print Online. Perhaps you have already known about this but it is new to me. A disclaimer: I do not own stock in FedEx, it’s stores and neither does my family.

What use to be Kinko’s and then FedEx Kinko’s is now FedEx Office and they offer FedEx Office Print Online. It only took a few minutes to download the print driver and one re-boot (what doesn’t). After that the FedEx Print Driver just becomes like any other print driver. You can get to the offices location from the main FedEx website as there is a tab for Office/Print Services on the main page.

After you determine what you want to print you select the FedEx Print Driver (as you would any other print driver) and then proceed as if you were going to print on your local or network printer. The only big difference is that you have to pick it up at a FedEx Office store. I have to admit it worked very efficiently the very first time I tried it, only one caveat. I tried to just print one page and since the cost was only 59 cents I had to print 2 pages as they have a $1.00 minimum. I did not consider this to be very bad at all.

 

I wrote Google some time ago and suggested that they set something up like this with Google Doc’s and perhaps Microsoft would consider it with Live as this would be a great feature for the “road warrior” or frequent Starbucks user.

Finding a FedEx Office to print to was easy. As you process the print job it asks and let’s you search by zip to find a location. Now here you are in a strange city, you can get the zip code from the barista but not sure which location is closest, use the GPS in your phone. WOW, what a concept! You have just made a sales call (or whatever) and need to get right back to the customer with a confirmation – you got it.

In talking with the person in the FedEx Office in the store on Kolb Ave in Cincinnati I discovered that software is not a problem as what they get is a PDF and that is what they print. The documents that I sent were Office 2007 native files and they had no problem.

One interesting thing is that when I installed the driver it also appeared in my Microsoft Word 2007 software as an option and added a FedEx  Kinko’s tab. I guess everything hasn’t yet changed to FedEx Office.

I did forget one thing, the driver download and install is FREE and works in Windows 2000, Windows XP as well as Windows Vista. What more could you want?

Happy New Year and become a kid again and love to learn. May 2009 be great to everyone. One last thought; All Leaders Are Readers! Now are you just holding a spot for someone else or are you a true leader.