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Dealing with many file formats

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by tomsal

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I'd thought I'd throw this one out to the masses and see how other companies deal with this issue.

We use e-mail rather heavy to do our day to day business. Our clients will e-mail us workorders, invoices, spec sheets, proposals and trouble reports to us practically all day long, everyday.

Trouble is we get the files in multiple formats from Excel to Lotus to Word to Word Perfect, some clients will send images in .JPG format others will use .TIFF (my personal *least* favorite image format btw) and still others like to send images in Photoshop format (I forget the extension).

My dilemma is our people who deal with the clients directly our in-doctrinated with pleasing the client's every whim so they want to allow the client to send any information in ANY format that they wish - regardless if in-house we support it or not (not to mention how some formats hog way more space than others).

Then the other end of the stick is some of vendors (we have two kinds of customers - the clients who are high rankers of retail chains, they pay us, and the vendors who are largely "small guys" who we pay in return) are so computer illiterate that you'd be amazed they turn on a computer without developing a migraine.

We have about 100 clients but we have 10's of thousands of vendors in our network, so you can see the trouble created by file formats and having no standard for them.

How do YOU deal with such a thing in your organization? How do you enforce a policy in a way that doesn't make your customers feel "less smart"....(our vendors are not computer "people" and tend to get VERY EASILY flustered with you tell them to change a way they do something on the computer).

4 replies

by lordinfidel

This is a marriage of the business side and the technical side.

generallly for us, we tell our clients what file formats we will accept. If they are anything out of the norm that we need to convert, then we charge them for it.

Basically I would look at what programs you have and the cost and time it takes to convert files.

To give you a case, we have the ability to automatically convert powerpoints into jpg images via a web interface. We have to inform our clients that they can upload ppt files as long as they are straight powerpoints without any extra stuff in them (ie macros, external links, etc). If they do so we charge them extra.

Same thing when they send us weird image sizes or formats. The point is, your business endhas to resolve this. From the technical end, you tell the business side, what you can accomplish with your available tools. And it should be up to them to regulate charges and how they want to create the standard.

by guruofdos

Heard of fax?? Sometimes's it's easier to say to someone...sorry we cannot accept that format, please fax the information. That's one option.

The other options are more brutal

a) If you cannot support OUR formats, we CANNNOT support you! Nasty, but it does work!

b)Try and agree on a middle way. If the clients prefer to send TIFFS but could do BMP's and you prefer JPG's but can accept BMP's then agree on a format which maybe neither of you prefer but both can work with.

The two allegedly 'standard' formats are GIF for graphics and PDF for documents. JPG's are not standard as Photoshop handles them one way, and other programs another. Many PSP JPG's cannot be opened in my JPG software!

by tomsal

Thanks for ideas.

Actually we already rely heavy on faxing. However some of the work we do requires full color images with some degree of clarity so certain skilled members of our staff can analyze the images. Obviously faxing is no good for thissort of application.

Another thing is some of our vendors don't even own a fax machine and its a miracle that they own a computer (usually its a very old one - I'm talking 486/66 to Pentium 100 kind of old).

I was starting to draft and short policy on the file format thing, I just wanted some opinions first so I posted here. With the input I know have, I'll bring the issue to our next management meeting.

Thanks guys.

by mc_user

At my last job we took submissions from graphic artists for greeting cards. We received every known graphic format I could think of.

When we got a really unusual format we sent back an e-mail saying that we were processing the file but it would take some time to convert it to one of our "corporate standard formats." We then attached a stock letter with a list of the file formats we considered "standard" and how to create these files from the most of the standard image processing programs. In the letter we "hinted/suggested/implied" that any submission given in these formats wouldbe given priority over others. It was technically true. Files that did not have to be converted would be looked at a lot quicker than ones we would have to convert.

Another option we used was with the HR department. They were getting text files from a variety of programs. We installed software for them to handle the different formats that were unreadable. DataViz was the company and they make software that can open Mac files on the PC and display a variety of PC files formats.

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