Webmaster's blog

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.

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

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?

By Corey Smith

When considering the many costs that an organization has to expend, one of the most mis-understood is that of printing costs.

The Gartner Group estimates that as much as 30% of organizations' print costs can be eliminated with simple print device management.

The challenge organizations have is that often there is a division of responsibility for purchasing print devices and supplies for those print devices. Different departments have different responsibilities when it comes to creating efficiencies and cost control strategies.

I have spoken with many IT directors that simply don't care how much printer supplies costs. The cost can be 15 cents for a b/w print and 50 cents for a color print but as long as the cost of acquisition of the device is low, they will buy it.

by Jon Reardon

In an unpublished InfoTrends’ research project conducted slightly more than one year ago, we surveyed the US financial services industry to learn about the adoption rates and technology usage behaviors of office/workgroup document solutions. Compliance matters loomed large in this study.

We surveyed more than 350 businesses in the segments of: banking, insurance, investment, and credit and lending. Approximately 50% of the respondents came from large businesses with 1,000 employees, followed by an even split between medium (100-999) and small (1-99) at 25% each.

By Corey Smith

Every six months or so, comes a concern via the media that the MFP, or multifunction printer, is not secure and causes security holes on your network. When considering security on your network, there are some common sense approaches to ensuring you are protected from harm.

At eWeek, Rosen Sharma wrote a very simple article on securing your MFP. The article opens with the following:

Think you’ve plugged all of the vulnerabilities in your enterprise network? How about that multifunction printer over there in the sales department? As Dr. Rosen Sharma, president and CTO of Solidcore Systems explains, these devices frequently contain operating systems that are just as vulnerable to malware as your desktop computers.

from ScanGuru

The Business World is a rapidly changing entity, and technology helps adapt to these changes quickly and will help a company keep its competitive advantage. Paper has always been an inefficient medium for conducting business processes, and recently has become a key focus for Business Process Improvement (BPI) initiatives. So what are the main reasons for a company or organization to move towards the paperless environment?

Below are the two main categories: