Is RIDGIDConnect Express for you?
Over the past few months, the RIDGIDConnect team has been busy sifting through your feedback, observing your usage trends, and deciding how we can add the most value to our customers. The result of those activities is the addition of a new level of account to the site, Express.
Express is immediately attractive to you when you go to sign up because, yes, it's free. Obviously, we can't offer you all of the features of the site, since we still have our own bills to pay, but allow us to help you understand the pros and cons of Express, so you can best decide which level you should sign up for.
An Express level account differs from a Basic level in quite a few ways. The three most important ways are the amount of storage you have, the number of reports you can keep on the site, and the types of files you can share on those reports. We'll cover the minor differences later but for now, we'll focus on these three.
Storage Limits
Sign up for a new Express account and you'll receive 0.5 GB of storage, 1/20th of the 10 GB of storage on a Basic account. This will still give you enough space to store a significant amount of photos but will greatly reduce the number of videos you can store on the site. This might not be a big deal to you, though, when we look at our next major difference: the types of files you can share on reports.
File Type Limitations
A RIDGIDConnect Basic account will let you attach and share any type of file that you have whether it's a video (.avi, .mov, .3gp, .wmv, etc.), image (.jpg, .bmp, .png, .gif, etc.), or other (.doc/.docx, .xls, .pdf, CAD, etc.). Express will only allow you to upload the video and image file types. Express will take that a step further and only allow you to attach the image types to the "Public Media" section of a report which is the section visible to those you share the report with. What's the best way to handle this? By uploading your inspection video, using the bookmark and image extraction tools to pull the frames out of the video that highlight the issues, and using those to build your report that you share.
Number of Reports
Next, an Express account is limited to 50 active reports at any time. This isn't a big deal if you only do 1-2 inspections per month. If you do more than that, however, you'll probably want to think about a Basic or higher level account so you can store all of your past reports and reference them should you need to make a repeat or annual visit to a location you've already inspected. Also, should you need to share the inspection material with someone else in the future, you'll want to make sure you have the report still stored on your account so you can share it again with only a few clicks.
Other Restrictions
Finally, an Express account cannot take advantage of a few other features that are available to Basic or higher level users. These include the mobile apps for BlackBerry and Android that allow you to upload images and video from your Smart Phone, the dispatch application currently available on BlackBerry, Contact Management features built into your address book, mapping of the contacts in your address book on a Bing Map, and the security features on reports such as limiting the number of views or setting an expiration date on a customer's access.
We're always looking for ideas and suggestions so let us know if there's something you could find extremely helpful on the site or need a better explanation of anything!