Transitional Services

While preparing a post on the topic of transitional services, I found out that someone else had already done a great job of introducing the topic.  Mike McDerment of Freshbooks gave this definition:

Transitional Services are services that facilitate a user’s transition from one platform to the next – or at the least, ease their pain.

Before going on, I’d recommend you read the rest of his post.  For Freshbooks, their transitional service was offering paper invoices as an adjunct to their core tool of providing online invoicing.  It made it easy for users and companies to shift to the online system while making the old process (paper invoices) even easier than before.  That’s the best sort of transitional tool.  Make the old easier.  Smooth the transition to the new.  Don’t leave people behind in the process.

This is precisely the service Postful has been able to offer to a number of other sites (many too small to either efficiently handle their own print production or outsource).  We let them shift to a digital workflow while making it easy for users who still prefer or need paper.

By doing so, we have no illusions about print returning to it’s central role in communication.  But we do believe that, like any worthwhile transition, this one will be accelerated and eased by not making it an all-or-nothing decision.

While billions of documents are still printed and mailed every day, the information that composes those documents is increasingly stored on the web.  Providing a bridge between that data and print output is a huge task and offers equally large opportunities.

More, as we develop these processes for print, we’re building the tools that will be needed to help the rest of the manufacturing sector integrate with the computing cloud.  Print is just the first of the these physical processes to make the transition.  When the wave hits the rest of the manufacturing sector, we can look forward to a surge of innovation which promises to make the next decade a very interesting time.