Case Study: USPTO

Accessing Information Shouldn't Be An Ordeal

Andrew Smith is an attorney at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Like many professionals today, Andrew gets around 300 emails a day. Andrew's emails, however, are filled with intensely detailed rules and regulations covering topics ranging from the massively encompassing, to the astonishingly minute. With this daily flood of emails, and the pressure of adhering to strict regulations, Andrew needed a better tool for communication between employees. He needed a simple and inexpensive way for people to access information.

"As a government agency, the USPTO has a lot of tradition and rules and practices, such as section 8 compliance, or mandatory changes of 'and' to an ampersand," Andrew said. Like in most organizations, many of these policies are distributed on an "as needed" manner. With so many procedures and rules piled up over time, it was never an easy experience to search through 5,000 emails or look through multiple versions trying to find the right one.

Much More Quickly with PBworks

"PBworks provides a quicker way to get information to employees," Andrew said. "We use PBworks to warehouse documents, and especially multiple versions of documents. With about 9,000 employees in the USPTO, there's lots of room to lose things. We're looking to warehouse things in an orderly manner." And in that example of digging through 5,000 emails for the right version of a specific procedure, Andrew explained that PBworks provides a much quicker way to get the right information.

Simplicity is a Virtue

Andrew loves the simplicity and ease of use of PBworks. "Sometimes having more complexities would not make it easier to use or better to use. A lot of the fancy functions would go to waste." PBworks, with its simple and easy interface and point-and-click editing delivers results without adding any confusion.

"PBworks saves me between 2 to 3 hours a week. But the more important savings come from not losing opportunities that I can take advantage of because I can access information so much more quickly with PBworks."