Document Management

Document costs increase every year thanks to the growing volume of information. These costs include everything from printing and copying to the infrastructure needed to store and retrieve critical information.

Recent research by InfoTrends found that overall expenditures on documents were 6% of annual revenues.

Fortunately there are several practical strategies for medium and small businesses you can employ to reduce your document costs:

Multifunction Systems

New workgroup multifunction systems can provide full color printing, copying, faxing, and scanning services in one device.

Multifunction systems are less expensive to operate than laser printers especially when it comes to color output. These systems operate on low cost-per-page agreements that include supplies, preventative maintenance, and on-site service. The net result is lower output costs.

Printer Management

In many offices, 80% of document output is attributed to printing. A recent study by Hewlett-Packard showed that a properly-managed printing environment can cut printing costs by 8-42. The first step is to understand your actual printing expense. continue reading...

What is a Multifunction System?

According to the Multifunction Products Association, a multifunction system (MFP) is defined as “office equipment for paper management connected to a PC or network that handles two or more of the following functions: printing, scanning, copying or faxing.”

Everything You Need In One Device

The newest generation of MFPs provides important office functionality in one reliable device with the capabilities of printing, copying and scanning in full color.

Printing

An MFP works like any other laser printer, but also adds the type of finishing functionality you expect from a copier including stapling and two-sided printing.

Scanning

Revolutionize your office and scan documents into common digital formats like PDF, .jpeg or .tiff formats. These files can be sent to email addresses or to any folder on the network. continue reading...

Digital cameras have become a necessity for businesses. They’re inexpensive, easy to use and create a message that cannot be expressed with words. Of course getting the pictures onto a marketing statement or proposal is another step that needs to be addressed. Businesses are now using color multifunction systems to print color digital photos at blazing speeds at a fraction of the cost of slow photo printers.

Personal Photo Printers vs. Color Multifunction Systems (MFPs)

· Personal photo printers are slower than MFPs taking multiple minutes to print a photo compared to an MFP’s speeds of up to 45 photos per minute.

· Most personal printers do not allow you to print on letter-sized paper, limiting you to a 4 X 6 size. MFPs conveniently let you print high-resolution photos on normal 8.5 X 11 size paper.

· Photo printer paper is expensive and cost per photo can be from 25 to 80 cents per page. MFPs can reduce that cost. continue reading...

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. continue reading...

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. continue reading...

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. continue reading...

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. continue reading...

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. continue reading...