Webmaster's blog

Lower your business’ costs and begin printing your marketing materials in house.

Customize your marketing materials and take advantage of on-demand printing. This will eliminate the need for expensive bulk orders of generic brochures and the unnecessary waste of replacing obsolete brochures.

Consider creating a Marketing library that will enable your sales and marketing employees to access marketing documents from a network folder. They will be able to open, revise and print the materials according the specific client you are working with.

Review these suggestions and make your in-house marketing materials more effective.

· Be sure to use a cost-effective color printer or multifunctional copier. Some systems can allow 20-page documents to be printed in less than one minute.

A new report by Datamonitor argues that many organizations waste 10% of their staff costs because employees can not find the right information to do their jobs. Over 50% of staff costs are now for employees performing “information work”. But the employees are suffering from both information overload and information underload, and as a result they spend up to 25% of their day searching for the right information. Datamonitor argues that this why some organizations could be frittering away as much as 10% of their staff costs on wasted effort.

My last couple blogs have been about the unseen costs of printing and the benefits of color. So how can you responsibly incorporate color printing into your business plan without running up costs?

1. Reduce Use of Ink Jet Printers

Inexpensive to purchase, inkjet printers are actually the most expensive color output devices to operate. This goes hand-in-hand with office supply stores advertisements focusing on their high profit ink jet cartridges. While convenient for small home office print jobs, ink jet printers become inefficient, slow and costly when running lengthy full color documents.

2. Cut back on Unnecessary Background Color

Documents with solid color backgrounds use significantly more toner and increase the cost of printing. Instead, use bright colors on a white background. Your handouts will be easier to read and look more professional.

In today’s competitive business environment, it is critical to get the highest possible return from customer communications like invoices, proposals and marketing materials.

Recent research indicates that using color and graphics in written communication boosts interest, enhances retention, improves comprehension and persuades more easily.

Neurological and psychological research has shown that the impact of color is significant and largely unconscious. Studies have shown that as much as 60% of consumers decide to purchase a new product based on its color rather than quality, workmanship or price guarantee.

The results of the study, found in The Definitive Guide to Office Color Printing by Don Jones, revealed the following powerful benefits of communicating with color:

By Tristam Wallace

I wanted to pass along a link to a great article on MFPs and security in Computer Technology Review, written by Sharp's Vince Jannelli.  It is a very succinct and well-written summary of security concerns around  MFPs and I agree with nearly everything in it.

However, I want to address the following statement that Vince made in relation to platform virus security:

"A proprietary platform is idea, since it won't be susceptible to viruses designed to attack more popular operating systems available on personal computers."

I don't dispute the statement. But, it is important to weigh the trade offs between a proprietary platform and an open platform. While the risk of viral attack is lower because it is unlikely hackers will develop malicious code aimed at proprietary MFP platforms, the costs of managing those proprietary platforms are significant -- particularly for those companies that have mixed fleets (brands) of MFPs.

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.