Webmaster's blog

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.

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.

By Corey Smith

With the financial challenges of current market conditions, being green can provide your organization with much needed fiscal relief. Being green can help you to save money.

There are more factors in being green in printing than you might think.

eWeek has published an interesting article on this very topic.

From ScanGuru

The Capture Applications on the market today are outstanding when it comes to automation. For any organization that has a large scanning project, or requires minimal time and maximum efficiency from its scan operators, some level of automation is a necessity. So what does automation mean when we are discussing capture applications

Below are some key feature that will minimize the time and effort required to scan and process documents:

Document Separators – with most scanners, if you have 10 documents to scan, you will need to run each set of pages through the document feeder, and save them off individually to your repository. Applications that allow document separators provide a means to place separator sheets between each of your document sets, place the entire pile into the document feeder, and let the software split the stack into individual files. This is a huge time saver, even with a small number of documents.

From ScanGuru

The Capture Applications on the market today are outstanding when it comes to automation. For any organization that has a large scanning project, or requires minimal time and maximum efficiency from its scan operators, some level of automation is a necessity. So what does automation mean when we are discussing capture applications

Below are some key feature that will minimize the time and effort required to scan and process documents:

From ScanGuru

What should a Law Firm look for in a scanning application?

Here are some suggestions:

Barcode Separator Functionality - Separator pages allow the user to insert a specially coded page between documents in a stack. Once scanned, the software uses these pages to determine when a document begins and ends. This allows the scanning of many documents at once, rather than scanning one at a time. There is also the notion of "intelligent separators" which allow you to encode data on the separator page, such as case, matter, attorney, etc.

Image Enhancement - These tools will automatically adjust contrast and brightness, remove problematic colors, remove speckles, and thicken fonts. If you want the highest quality image, with the least amount of scanning operator intervention, this is a key component to any scanning system.

by Corey Smith

When it comes to making decisions on moving to an electronic content management system in your business, who is the person most responsible for making that decision?

In the Records Management Report from AIIM last year, I found a very interesting chart.

Let me ask this... Why would the records of a business be an IT decision? What does IT have to do with records management?