Office Document Strategies Blog

Ever since the early days of the photocopier and now the connected printer there have been unscrupulous players who have promoted and sold toner for massive premiums over the real retail price.  There are a number of ways the scams work but the most common we see involve phone contacts to unwitting potential targets.  

One of the biggest issues for IT security and business operations is keeping their data safe and secure. 

There is a massive amount of material available about data backup, building redundancy for continued operations and how to teach people to be careful in providing access to company data. In spite of all of the effort and expense that is put into this field there are still too many data breaches.  

Why is it in a world where thousands of transactions are handled every minute using the tap of a credit card on a terminal many businesses still cling to manual paper driven processes?  Express Pay speeds up sales processes for vendors and purchasers.

When I started in the Document Management field the common term for the practice of capturing paper records and converting them to digital images was simply document imaging.  While the process involved in doing the conversion seems pretty simple in today's terms back twenty some years ago it was seen as a miraculous change in office environments.  

As we have all experienced the retail environment is rapidly changing.  At one time the physical retail store was the core of every retailer's business but for many in today's environment it is only one component of a retail system.

Sometimes we all get complacent when we hear about cyber attacks on businesses and organizations.  We figure, too bad, it is unfortunate that someone got caught by this nefarious practice but it doesn't happen around here.  Recent events have brought this right to our doors in the Hamilton, Burlington area.

One of the most insidious kinds of spam and malware that is currently active around the world is what is known as Cryptoware or Ransomware.  This attack gets users to open a type of malware which starts working on the user's workstation to attack files with extensions from common document type software.  

A recent article has pegged the value of the internet of things (IofT) as a $300 billion industry. When you think of all the items you can now connect to your home network:

We are always looking for useful information we can share with readers to help them better operate their equipment and take advantage of the capabilities that office technologies provide.  Sometimes we come across information from other industries sources which we trust that provide good solid ideas.  This blog is one of those and I am pleased to repost a piece that was written by a colleague from New Jersey who is one of the best  and most experienced advisers I have dealt with.  

Five Tips For Better Scanning With Your Copier

"Right before I left for a trip to Texas, I received an order from a net new customer for the replacement of their old digital copier for a new digital copier.

When I opened the pdf that contained three pages I saw that the quality of the scan was poor, so poor in fact that it looked like the document had been faxed.

For those of us in the industry, we know that scanned documents especially lease documents need to be readable. Poor quality scans will not be accepted by the leasing companies.

Thus I thought I would post these tips of how to scan higher quality documents from the scanner with your copier.

Tips

1. Increase the resolution from the default of 200 dpi to at least 300 dpi.  The higher resolution will result in a larger file size, but the document will be sharp, crisp and readable.
2. Check to make the colour scanning enabled.  This will enable the scanner to scan both black and colour documents in a single scan.
3. If your document is two sided, enable the two sided scanning option. Thus, you'll only have to scan the two sided document once.
4. Your copier may have an additional feature called 'blank page detection'.  Enabled blank page detection will automatically delete any and all blank pages.  This is especially useful for two sided documents that may have a blank back side page at the beginning and end of the document.
5. Enable the OCR detection.  This means that every word on a page is indexed.  Thus, when you open the scanned pdf document you'll be able to search that pdf document for a certain word, phrase, number etc.

More and more businesses are relying on scanning documents instead of copying them and saving paper based files.  That's a good thing, however many are not checking these documents for the quality of the document once they have been scanned.
Some copiers will allow you to preview the scanned pages before you scan the document to any location on your network.  This one feature can save countless hours of scanning because the original documents were not scanned at high enough resolution (dpi).

Do your homework and ask questions from the rep.  The reason for asking the rep is because many of these additional scanning features may not be on the manufacturer's brochure, in addition, they may not work the way you think they would work.  Do the research and find a quality rep who knows their system inside and out."

The above article was written by Art Post, and experienced office technology specialist in New Jersey who frequently writes and comments on the industry, its practices and products.  Art's material can be found at  The Print4Pay Hotel Blog.

We hope you found these tips useful and happy scanning.

Lee K

One of the challenges for organizations wishing to use cloud services for their computing from a Canadian base has been the access to appropriate services based in the Canadian political jurisdiction.  This has been especially true when considering Microsoft cloud services as up to now there were no Canadian based data centres run by Microsoft.