It's late Friday afternoon, and the FedEx driver is due any moment for the last pickup before the weekend. Suddenly, without warning, an urgent email pops into your Microsoft Outlook inbox. A customer needs three widgets, and they need them yesterday.

But you don't even flinch. You click the "ship" button on your FedEx QuickShip toolbar, choose the customer's name from your Outlook address book, and create the shipment. Disaster averted. World saved.

Or something like that.

The FedEx QuickShip toolbar is a free toolbar that integrates into your Outlook 2003 or 2007 inbox. The belief is that the integration of these two entities will lead to saved time and increased productivity. To be fair, you can do plenty with the FedEx QuickShip toolbar: create and track U.S. shipments, get rates, schedule pickups, and find the nearest staffed FedEx location – all without leaving your Office Outlook application. And that's a plus.

However, we think the "integration" between FedEx and Outlook isn't nearly integrated enough. It seems that the only integration is a new toolbar and the ability to ship to any address in your Outlook address book. Otherwise, the act like they don't know each other. Want to track a package in your Outlook inbox? You'll need to copy the tracking number, choose track from your toolbar, and paste it into the tracking field. Of course this might save a little time...but how is this much different than pasting that same number into a web browser?

For you who use Outlook and FedEx as your main weapons, this should be a boon. For all others...we'd wait for a more integrated solution.

You'll need Outlook 2003 or 2007 and a FedEx shipping account.

[via AppScout]

Adobe had teamed up with Kinkos FedEx to print documents over the internet, unfortunately this move upset smaller printing companies.

The FedEx printing option had begun in Acrobat 8.1 and Reader 8.1 in June. However, complaints from rival businesses has forced Adobe to rethink their partnership with Kinko's and initiate a plan to take the feature out by an October release.

FedEx Kinko's will continue to distribute a version of the Adobe Reader with the special printing feature on its website.

FedEx has gone through many reinventions over the years, but the latest one brings real value to businesses, both large and small. The software, titled Ship Manager has once again put FedEx out in front and sweetened the deal with data available where the customer lives. Now with FedEx's software can hookup to any database, ERP application, or other customer software that is ODBC compliant. FedEx will even assist customers over the phone with their new software, and help customers connect to some non-standard data sources, where it used to take the FedEx consulting team several days to complete the code-writing. By tying its customers to their service by integrating native data, FedEx has found a way to capture a measure of that elusive software entrenchment (the x-factor), that makes a customer not want to use anyone else but FedEx.

[Via InfromationWeek]

It was really the inevitable Google Maps hack: PackageMapper uses Google Maps to draw a map of your incoming package's route, and works for UPS, FedEx, and USPS. Even neater, it can show you the routes for many packages at once so you get an at-a-glance view of where your  packages are. Now if only there were a service that would do this in real-time (i.e. how far is the truck away from my house right now?)