Print stuff before you get to FedEx Kinkos with Print Online
Printing stuff At FedEx Kinkos can be a pain if you're in a hurry. FedEx Kinkos has a new service called Print Online that lets you print out documents at home or the office to be ready for you when you get there.
Printing at a FedEx Kinko's can be a real pain. You have to deal with a foreign computer and pray that its software is working, which can be tough if you've got a Word 2003 file that won't open in Word 2000. To improve this experience, FedEx Kinko's is rolling out Print Online, a Web-based application that lets you print out various documents from your own computer. You can also pay for things online, which means not having to deal with loading up a special card with the funds to get the job done.
Print Online lets you pick the location of the FedEx Kinko's where you want your documents printed, along with options to get them delivered using FedEx. If you are putting together a job that uses several files or needs inserts, you can just add, remove, or reorder the files on a master list. There's currently no image support though, so you're limited to whatever you can add inside of your usual Microsoft Office, PDF, and text files.
It took Kinko's a long time to get this service going. You normally can't get a service like this unless you're doing a large print job through a professional printing shop, or you're willing to pay a premium to work with a shop that handles the shipping too. I'd like to see some image support and maybe some document visualization beyond an ordered upload list, but it's nice to have the printing and shipping combined in a way that makes sense for people who can't always leave what they're doing to deal with brick-and-mortar print shops.