Corey Smith's blog

from Xerox

If you work in an office, chances are you don’t change the copier or printer cartridge because it’s too messy or you just don’t know how to do it. That’s according to a new Zogby survey, commissioned by Xerox, of more than 2,000 office workers across the U.S. aimed to better understand some of the reasons behind office printing habits.

Of those surveyed, more than 1,000 respondents said they have experienced a mess when changing a printer/copier toner cartridge.

The mess, plus a lack of knowledge on how to change a printer cartridge, is why more than 10 percent of respondents typically put off printing until someone else changes the toner cartridges.

ROCHESTER, N.Y., Jan. 13, 2009  -- Because of a long-held perception that color printing is expensive, most office workers think using a color printer for routine office documents is a luxury. That's according to a new survey about office worker print behaviors conducted by Zogby and commissioned by Xerox.

In addition, the overwhelming majority said they'd print in color if it cost the same as black and white printing.

That's possible with Xerox's Phaser 8860 solid ink printer and MFP, which lets customers print color guilt-free for the same price as their black and white printing. In addition to providing high-quality, vibrant prints, these products are extremely easy to use - no bulky, messy toner cartridges to change - and produce 90 percent less waste than traditional color laser printers.

By Corey Smith

eWeek posted today a great article titled, How to Choose the Best E-mail Archiving Solution for Your Enterprise.

An increasing number of enterprises are investigating e-mail archiving solutions due to regulatory compliance, legal discovery and storage management issues. Understanding how to evaluate these e-mail archiving solutions is critical if you want to effectively address these business challenges.

If you understand the options for email archiving and how they apply to electronic document management, you can increase efficiency in your business and provide savings to your bottom line.

By Craig Faczan

Many VARs neglect imaging supplies in their product portfolios, and for good reason: There is very little margin on printers and OEM cartridges. With high-quality aftermarket products, however, you can develop a good source of recurring profits.

According to market research firm InfoTrends, OEMs own 73 percent of the market in monochrome cartridges and 93 percent in color cartridges—statistics that are lost on many solution providers. Generally speaking, competing with aftermarket cartridges is a losing battle: The market is small, price-driven, and saturated with competition. Why compete with thousands of companies fighting for a small percentage of the business when you can strategically convert customers from high-priced OEM cartridges and reap the rewards?

In the life of a typical laser printer, 80 to 90 percent of its total cost of ownership (TCO) is from cartridges. A high-end network laser printer that outputs a million pages may cost $1,000. Over its life, the printer will probably use about $8,000 in cartridges and require about $1,000 worth of service. To compete with local providers, the Internet, and even the OEMs, you likely would need to sell at 10 percent margins to reap about $1,000 of profit over the life of the printer. Clearly, that is not a compelling business model.

From BLI

November 26, 2008 – Xerox Office Group (XOG) held a briefing for industry analysts at its Wilsonville, OR, facility on November 19 to deliver a sneak preview at an all-new and groundbreaking color MFP set to debut in 2009. While details about the product (name, speed and price) won’t be shared until closer to its launch, the concept and execution certainly look intriguing—perhaps even game-changing for certain segments of the market.

The news: Xerox is readying an A3-class color MFP based on its solid-ink technology as a competitor to 11" x 17" color laser engines and HP’s Edgeline inkjet-based offerings. Pioneered by Oregon State University researchers in the 1980s and commercialized by printer maker Tektronix (Xerox acquired the color printing and imaging division of Tektronix in 2000), solid-ink engines are currently used by Xerox in some A4-class printers and MFPs such as the Phaser 8860 family (which includes the 8860 and the 8860MFP). The technology uses melted ink sticks, as opposed to toner particles or liquid ink, to render an image.

By James True

The Small-to-Medium (SMB) business segment may be one of the most misunderstood markets ever. Vendors erroneously assume SMB is a large, undifferentiated market that is easy to sell into, especially compared to large enterprises, where big brands and massive corporate sales forces are needed to get a foot in the door.

In fact, SMBs vary substantially in their technology needs. The smaller prospect is very different than the larger mid-sized firm in terms of the technologies they can use as well as how they buy, support and implement these technologies. The differences between small and mid-sized companies are well-illustrated by their document management technology needs. In particular, integrating electronic document management technology with the business applications commonly used by the small enterprise poses a special challenge.

November 17, 2008 -- A new study from the Photizo Group captures the nuances and preferences of the Western European Managed Print Services (MPS) market. The Western European MPS Decision Maker Tracking Study™ is the first dedicated research into managed print services in France, Germany and the UK. The first-of-its-kind study is available now.

"The practice of managed print services can be adopted by companies anywhere, but priorities, concerns and preferences can and do vary, according to our research. As vendors pursue MPS opportunities, this information can guide their efforts in productive directions. Companies in these countries considering MPS contracts will also benefit from understanding how others in their markets are evaluating and adopting MPS," said Ed Crowley, founder and president of the Photizo Group.

By Corey Smith

Tristam Wallace, at the Document Imaging Blog, had a very interesting post on SharePoint and Document Imaging. I think that one of the most common misconceptions is that if you have SharePoint in your office that you have a fully featured document imaging system.

SharePoint can certainly help increase your productivity through collaboration and document storage, but if you have a lot of unstructured data (documents that have been scanned), you probably need to look at integrating your document imaging system (capture/scanning or storage) with SharePoint to help your employees increase their document management productivity.

From BLI

November 11, 2008 - In 1971, Bill Hewlett, co-founder of HP, said, “The deepening concern for preservation of the environment involves the whole basic question of man on this earth: How may the earth’s resources be preserved?” From recycling computer printouts and punch cards in 1971, to creating a hardware recycling program in 1987 and initiating the HP Planet Partners program in 1991 to reclaim and recycle used HP print cartridges, processing them to recover plastics and metals for new products and diverting millions of tons of waste from landfills, HP has been involved in the environmental movement for decades.

From BERTL

Whether you call it records management, document management or information management, it comes down to the capture, storage and retrieval of your data. The amount of data generated by organizations today is phenomenal and is rapidly increasing. The latest measurement of data is in petabytes (1 million gigabytes)! So we forward emails, share documents, and store forms all at a blink of an eye and without a second thought of space. And most times there are a multitude of copies and versions of any one of these documents floating around on desktops and servers.