Free Office Medicine
Recently I traveled to Las Vegas to make a presentation to a Foodservice Technology Conference, and discovered that my carefully crafted one hour PowerPoint presentation was corrupted. Fortunately, I had a duplicate copy on my office PC, and was able to download the original. Had I known of the suite of products from OfficeRecovery, I would have been able to skip the tasks of finding an Internet connection, logging into the home office network, and hoping that my phone connection was good enough to sustain a 31 slide download.
This Internet supplier touts itself as ‘the Web source of data recovery software for corrupted Microsoft Office files’. Their software is capable of recovering MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook (in development), Exchange (beta), Access and Mac files. As of this writing, the company has released a beta version of ExchangeRecovery, and is soliciting customers to finish the testing prior to release. Anyone who orders the ExchangeRecovery beta is guaranteed a free final version of the product, hence ‘Free Office Medicine’.
The methodology employed in the data recovery of Microsoft Exchange in the event of a server crash or the accidental deleting of a mailbox, is to convert the Offline Storage Files (.ost) to a more common Personal Storage File (.pst) format to be read with Outlook or other compatible mail client. The screen layouts in all of their offerings are very much MS oriented, and the user interfaces are ‘wizard-style’.
A free demo version is available to ‘pretest’ the look and feel of ExchangeRecovery, and if the demo is satisfactory, the full version is available via downloading instructions delivered to your e-mail address.
Word documents that have been corrupted are recoverable by WordRecovery, which supports Versions 95, 97, 2000, and Word 6.0. The software will run under Windows 95/98 and Windows NT. A nice feature is the imbedding of the Recover ‘button’ directly into the Word Document options. Some of the limitations of this package include the inability to recover password-protected files, as well as files that contain charts, and drawings.
All of the company’s products may be purchased online, and the orders are fulfilled in just a few minutes. The pricing appears to be reasonable, with individual desktop suites ranging from $149.00 to $399.00. Volume pricing, available in units of ten desktops, starts at $290.00 up to $599.00, which includes 10 copies of WordRecovery, ExcelRecovery, and PowerPointRecovery. At $29.00 per seat, having the ability to recover my PowerPoint presentation seems like 'one good deal.' There are also Special pricing schedules available for 100 or more licenses.
Some additional incentives exist for those interested in some additional income… the ‘Referrer Program.’ After submitting a Referrer Application form, and having it approved, you will be eligible to receive a 20% commission on the net revenue of sales of OfficeRecovery products identified as resulting from a referer (you) within 30 days of a referral. A cookie system is used to track which referrer a customer comes from and the cookie is the only recognized means of identifying a referral.
I am sure that there are other e-commerce sites that also offer a ‘referral fee,’ but this is the first one that I have come across. And, before you ask, no, I do not get a fee for any reader that purchases this software.
Related Information:
OfficeRecovery (new window)OfficeRecovery Referrer Program (new window)