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MONDAY MORNING MESSENGER

Message prepared especially for Members of the American Institute of Inspectors® as well as Home Inspectors abroad

February 21, 2000

GOOOOOD MORNING, A.I.I.™

Today's Monday Morning Messenger is arriving directly from Denver, Colorado. This has been a whirlwind week that has included a lot of driving and not a spare moment to compose any original thoughts.. I'm not home in Utah yet and today's MMM will re-visit the previously discussed topic of E-mailing Inspection reports.

As mentioned last week both Shelly and I lost a Grandparent. We drove back to Missouri to take care of my Grandmother's funeral and then Shelly flew out of St. Louis with Jessica and Haily to Phoenix, Arizona to attend her Grandfather's funeral. Shelly and the kids are already back home while Adam, Aaron and myself are making the long trek of the Pioneers back to Orem, Utah.

Flying is such a quick mode of transportation when compared to automobiles. I actually found myself feeling sorry for our plight as we were returning across the state of Kansas. It was then that I realized that every 10 minutes we were traveling as far as the covered wagon Pioneers would travel in a single long day. That realization was a slap in the face. The five hundred miles that we traveled yesterday would have taken about 45 days to complete back in the mid 1800's.

Our travels through Missouri and Tennessee were also quite enlightening. I looked at many homes that were built back in the 1800's and realized; how grateful that I was that I am a Home Inspector in Utah. Relatively speaking the homes are not all that old in Utah. In fact, most were built after 1950 in my area with a large number being erected since 1970.

I feel bad for the Home Inspectors out there who spend the majority of their time inspecting old rotted structures. If this was the case in Utah I would immediately add on an extra 100 dollars or more for a pre-1950 home. I have not done this because we don't have the large amounts of structural rot and the inspections go pretty smoothly. The homes that I was looking at back in the Midwest were covered with so much rot that you would easily spend 1 1/2 hours on the exterior alone to poke, prod and document. I would hope that Inspectors in those types of areas are being adequately compensated for their time........ Is this a topic that you need to re-visit???

ADOBE ACROBAT QUESTION

More and more Inspectors are trying to get their reports into an electronic format that will allow the ability to securely send them via e-mail. Consider the benefit....... You can send the report from your office to the Agent and their client by clicking on the SEND button in your e-mail program. Gone would be the need for printing out the hard copies.... Suddenly your expenses are cut and you are that much further ahead of your checklist-toting buddies. Your would then be perceived as cutting edge and the most technological Inspector can usually command the highest fees.

I just received the following e-mail.......

Hi Mr. Leavitt, I would like to thank you for all the info regarding the Adobe Acrobat program and how it works with the 3D software. I have one more question for you before I buy the software (Adobe Acrobat). How do you attach the summary report to the report so as you can sent both the report and the summary as one attachment to the e-mail?. Thanks again for all the information. Sincerely, Eugene Duffy

Eugene: Thanks for the kind words....... Don't even hesitate on buying the software..... It quickly pays for itself in less usage of printer cartridges, paper, postage and report covers.

Using Adobe Acrobat occurs by printing the document to an Adobe print driver instead of a typical printer driver. Doing so creates a PDF file. What you will do is print the report and name the file. Then you will print the summary (which I presume is a word processor document) as another file. Adobe Acrobat will then allow you to insert the summary into the report file and make them all as one file. The other option is to just send 2 attached files. I do this regularly with Radon reports
etc. Michael

Back on January 18, 1998 I produced the following portion of the MMM dealing with E-mailing reports. I am going to reshare it here.........

E-MAILED REPORTS???

I received the following e-mail from Bill Schwahn in Montana....

MICHAEL, HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU AND YOUR FAMILY.
I am very interested in the E-Mail of your inspection reports, and agree that I will need to be able to E-Mail my reports in able to comply with my clients expectations in the very near future.

HELP what is a PDF file???
Do you receive any confirmation that the report has been received by the correct party???

APPRECIATE ANY INFORMATION.

THANK YOU AGAIN -- YOUR ADVICE AND DIRECTION HAS CONTRIBUTED TO MY SUCCESS,

BILL SCHWAHN - BRIDGER VIEW INSPECTION - MONTANA

What made it even more interesting was the phone call this week from Rick Deboard from the Bay Area in California. Rick was using the 3-D software at least 6 months before myself. He was the one who pointed me in their direction after I had looked at countless other programs. Rick's conversation went something like this........ "Hey Michael, what does it take to be able to e-mail my reports? I know that you are currently doing it and I have booked an inspection for tomorrow and need to know what to do to be able to e-mail it. I told my client that I could e-mail him the report." His request floored me because Rick had yet to read last week's MMM that promised to discuss the topic this week. Rick was also in a bind and could not wait to read this edition of the MMM, so I stepped him through the process.

E-MAILING CHALLENGES

As most of you are aware, "E-mailing is GREAT!!!" What a simplistic form of communication. If small text messages are your forté, then cyber communication is for you. Now complicate the issue with a 10 to 20 page report that is full of text, custom headers, custom footers, page numbering, sketches, graphics and photos. This type of information far exceeds the ability of the standard e-mail window message.

Faxing reports is laborious and a real pain to manually feed 14 pages through the fax machine. It is even more inconvenient for the client to receive 14 pages on a curly fax roll paper. Text is sometimes difficult to read, color photos are black and white and near impossible to make out. Faxing is a thing of the past, and not a legal form of communication. A faxed report always has to be followed with an original for their files.

The dream is to be able to electronically send a full color detailed computerized report. As far as I know, I am the first Home Inspector within the US to succeed in this task. I accomplished this with a wonderful creation from the folks at Adobe® software called the PDF file. Bill Schwahn asked good questions. PDF stands for Portable Document Format. Confirmation of the e-mail receipt usually comes from the receiver sending you back confirmation. I also CC the e-mail to my own address so that I can see what the client receives.

If every client had the 3-D Inspection software installed on their machines, PDF would not be necessary. You could just send the saved file and the client could open it up. PDF is a successful way to save a file from any software program and open it up on another machine. If this interests you, then read on.......

ADOBE WEBSITE

The following is info about PDF's that I found at: http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat

Adobe® Acrobat® 3.0 software provides the fastest way to publish any document online. It empowers everyone to create and share documents across platforms while maintaining the documents' original look and feel.

Acrobat® 3.0 works with your existing Web browser and servers. So all you need to instantly access Portable Document Format (PDF) files on the Web is the free Adobe Acrobat Reader software. Since Acrobat is independent of platforms, applications, and distribution media, it is the ideal basis for your document distribution, archiving, and retrieval strategy.

Acrobat 3.0 includes a complete tool set for converting electronic files created in your favorite applications into PDF and publishing them on your Web site, intranet, CD-ROM, or distributing them by e-mail.

Acrobat Reader for viewing PDF documents
Acrobat Exchange® for adding navigational links, annotations, and security options
Acrobat PDF Writer for creating PDF files from your favorite business applications
Acrobat Distiller® for creating PDF files from your favorite PostScript® applications (including desktop publishing software)
Acrobat Catalog for creating full text indexes searchable with Acrobat Search
Acrobat Capture® plug-in with OCR (Object Character Recognition) for creating text-searchable PDF documents from scanned paper originals

About PDF - Portable Document Format (PDF) is the de facto standard for electronic distribution of documents because it's the best way to keep the look and feel you created intact. PDF files are compact, cross platform and can be viewed by anyone with a free Acrobat Reader. And you can create PDF files from any application using Adobe Acrobat 3.0 - even directly from paper! Find out how easy it is.

Additional benefits of using PDF:

PDF files can be distributed globally via e-mail, the Web, corporate intranets or CD-ROM.
Acrobat® Reader's navigation and zoom features enable closer review of PDF file text and images, even within your browser!
PDF files can be easily viewed and printed a page at a time.
Links, annotations, live forms, security options, video, and sound can be added to PDF files for enhanced online viewing with Adobe® Acrobat® 3.0.

Download the free Adobe Acrobat Reader - over 20 million people have!

This information seemed too good to be true. Meanwhile, the tech support at 3-D was reassuring me that the e-mail challenge was a current programming task that they were tackling. They were trying to use in-house programming only, not realizing that an outside solution already existed. If it was just text, the solution would be pretty straightforward. The 3-D report is very complex with merged documents, text and graphics and they could not give me any firm goal of when their solution would be available to test out. I am one of their Beta Testers and it was obvious that it was going to be a while. I continued to revisit the Adobe® site and spoke with numerous people about the Acrobat® program.

Along with e-mailed reports, I also wanted to make my sample report downloadable from my website. I have downloaded many documents from the internet in the PDF format. I found the format especially popular with government forms, pamphlets and CPSC information. The format has been around for a while and seemed to be becoming the accepted method of transporting documents electronically. Not information, but documents in their original form.

I finally purchased Adobe® Acrobat® online from the PC Mall for $164. It sells in the retail shops for $199. When it arrived I locked myself in the office. The CD loaded trouble free into my machine. I truly mean trouble free. The wizard easily stepped me through the process and all of the included programs installed on my machine flawlessly. In the process, it also installs two print drivers into your PRINTERS folder.

The theory is simple. Instead of choosing your regular printer, you select the Distiller Assistant v3.01 driver and then print the file. It scrolls through the pages as though it is going to print. About 15 seconds after the scrolling is done you are prompted to name the file and select what folder it will save it in. That's it....... Simple. Once it is in a PDF format I can send it via e-mail, save it to a disk, or make it downloadable from my website.

CLIENT'S E-MAIL MESSAGE

When I e-mail the report to the client I have to include the information that let's them know how to open the file. The majority of the people out there do not have the needed free helper program Adobe Acrobat Reader installed to open the PDF file. I wrote a special e-mail message that says.......

Here is your Home Inspection report. It is an attached PDF file. It can be printed and you have permission is granted by Michael Leavitt & Co for copies of the report to be distributed
to 1) The Buyer, 2) The Buyer's Agent and 3) The Seller (AGENTS: My client is the only one authorized to give permission to forward the report to the Seller). Please refer to the Service Agreement for more information on our Confidentiality Agreement.

PLEASE NOTE: To view or print .pdf files, you will need the Adobe® Acrobat® Reader installed and configured as a helper application on your browser or available on your hard drive for manual file opening. If you do not have an Adobe Acrobat Reader for your platform, you can download a free copy from the appropriate link below. Installation and setup instructions are provided at the site.

Click on the Adobe® link below if you would like to download a free copy Adobe® Acrobat®. It may be that your browser already supports PDF files. Try clicking on the attached file at the bottom of this e-mail first, and then download Adobe Acrobat only if needed.

http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/readstep.html

If you have any questions after reviewing the report, please call me at 801-225-8020. Please send me an E-mail letting me know that you received the report.

Michael Leavitt
Orem, Utah
Peaceofmind@TheHomeInspector.com
American Institute of Inspectors
www.TheHomeInspector.com

The PDF report file then gets attached to the e-mail message via the ATTACHMENT icon. The size of the file varies from 300k to 600k and takes a minute or so to download. Clients that have free e-mail (like Juno) cannot receive e-mail files larger than 50k, so you can't e-mail your cheapskate clients. The document is worth downloading because it is the exact full color report that you would normally pay big money in ink cartridges to produce.

TRY IT OUT

Would you like to try it for yourself???? Click here to download a sample report from my website. Remember that if you do not have the free Adobe Acrobat Reader program you will have to download it to open up the PDF file. I'm interested in your feedback. E-MAIL Me.

PERMANENT DOCUMENT

The key feature with the PDF file is that the client cannot tamper with the document. It can be printed out. It can be forwarded by e-mail to other people. With Adobe Acrobat it is also a breeze to add the other agents addresses to the original e-mail and send it to everybody simultaneously. It can be saved to a hard disk with ease. By the same token, the PDF file is easily saved by the Inspector on a zip disk as the electronic report. No more file cabinets full of paper. This was not easily accomplished before with 3-D or other softwares that incorporate word processing, text forms, sketches and photos. Instead, Inspectors have had to save these files independently.

Lenders in my area accept PDF files as original documents. This makes it possible to e-mail the follow-up re-inspect document on-site through either the inspected home's phone line, or through my cellular phone. Faxing is not acceptable on-site unless you have a separate fax machine and printer. This is because the lender needs original signatures and it is difficult to compose documents in the laptop, print it out, sign it, scan it back into the laptop and then fax it back to them. It will be interesting to see if the PDF format will become the industry standard.

YEAR 2000 SIDE NOTE: This information is as pertinent today as it was when I originally shared it with you. As for the prediction that the PDF will become the standard....... It already has.