Office Document Strategies Blog

Need to setup your remote office?

Working from home and wondering how to get access to your PC?

You can use the technology used by our IT to remotely support our clients. - get unattended access to key computer resources - flat rate setup and remote assistance to connect to the computers that are key to running your organization remotely, while you work from home - your bookkeepers, controllers, or production system or control PC's -

1. 1. up to 150 PC's can be set for unattended access and remote control per user account (only 1 can access at a time but you can purchase additional concurrent seats if needing more) $69.95 /mo including ongoing help desk support plus one time remote setup fee of $95.

Give remote access to your users to their PC's or company network servers or resources:

We can create and configure a VPN (Virtual Private Network) and show you how to connect and enable Remote Desktop access to your Windows PC's using free RDP tools (Remote Desktop Protocol) - control your PC as if sitting right at your desk - We configure your router and up to 10 users and Desktops for $495.

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Fax is the digital leading technology of the 80s and 90s of the last century.  In today's environment of instant communication in multiple forms it is hard to remember how revolutionary and process changing the popular use of fax became.

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For many of us it is hard to imagine that we are now into the third decade of the 'New" century.  If your career started prior to 2000 a lot of your ideas, systems and processes mentally were probably shaped by a very different way of doing things than we now experience.  For those who only know the world of the 21st century the contrasts are not as great but even for them much has changed in the last 20 years.

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Most businesses operate with the need for multiple people to participate in many areas of the operation and to share documents, data and procedures.  In many offices the tool for sharing info and documents is email. We are all familiar with long email trails where notes or documents get circulated, commented on and sent on to others or worse still replied to "all". 

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Business is always a challenging contest of dealing with the urgency of each day while keeping an eye on the future to ensure that problems do not occur because important decisions are put off. 

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There are many tools which are used in an office which become part of the underlying work flow without anyone really being aware.  In many cases these are software tools which have become inherently integrated into the daily work of many employees.  

If you think of the basic categories of software tools there are some which can be kind of generic, like your office suite for example, and some which become very industry and company specific. 

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If you need to improve productivity and find a simple way to Scan to your PC, Mac locally or in Cloud Apps like Microsoft 365 (Office 365) OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox or others, then this could be the App you have been looking for.

Most modern MFPs (multi-function printers) include the capability of basic network scanning in their setup. Using simple scan to email, or scan to folder systems, they make it possible for users to send and convert paper documents to images like PDF format. This capability provides many benefits to your users in the 'war on paper' but still leads to manual steps for filing or renaming, making the systems not as efficient for frequent work.

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Reports in the financial media in the first week of February have reported that Foxconn of Taiwan has entered into an agreement (about 90% certain) with Sharp to acquire the company for $5.5 billion.  This number is a real premium over the stated  book value of Sharp which has been under pressure due to losses.  

Foxconn on the other hand is a strong tech company which specializes in building product for other companies, most notably Apple iPhones.  The speculation of the value of Sharp to Foxconn is the knowledge and manufacturing capability of Sharp in screen tech which could be applied to future mobile devices and other displays.

Here's how the announcement has been covered:

• Bloomberg
• Fast Company
• engadget
• Reuters
• Apple Insider

In all of the coverage the focus of the discussions is the Sharp display expertise.  Of course Sharp has other businesses it is involved with, especially the print business which has been much speculated over the past few years to be a target to be spun off to others in the industry.
Will Foxconn continue to support the Sharp print business once it has operational control if the buyout goes through?  This is something which is not discussed as of yet.  The print division of Sharp was reportedly profitable while many of the other components of the company were losing money.  

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In 2009 Xerox made a large acquisition to be able to move to penetrate the technology outsourcing business on the computer and systems side.  Understanding that much of the growth of business technology systems business required a congruence between the hardware and print business and the network business that was connecting all the devices the strategy was to get a foot in both camps.  

On January 29th Xerox announced it was splitting into two public companies, one focused on document technology (the 'old' print business) and one on business process outsourcing by the end of 2016.  The two companies will be independent with two CEOs, two boards and separate business operations.  It essentially says that the combined strategy has not worked and that a different structure is needed going forward.

It is very interesting to look at this announcement in light of the split that HP has also undergone.  In the HP situation the decision was to create two companies with different market targets based upon size and business type.  HP Inc. retains the personal computer and printer business while a newly formed Hewlett-Packard Enterprise would focus on the services, server and storage businesses primarily focused on larger enterprises.

Whereas HP defined the new roles by market segment primarily by size keeping services and hardware in both new entities, it appears that Xerox has decided to keep its traditional hardware business in one company and spin the technology services business of into a new entity.

Of course both strategies have merit depending upon the strengths of the originating operations and there are businesses that have successfully rebuilt themselves like this before.  One which comes to mind is IBM which has transformed into almost exclusively a services business after selling off its hardware operations to Lenovo, first on the PC side and then in a subsequent deal on the server side as well.

What a new Xerox will end up looking like is anyone s guess at this point.  Will the retrenching of the traditional document focused print side stay as is or will it be able to make changes to compete in an area of business that is very different than it was only ten years ago.  

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For many years businesses have been told that they can improve their processes by reducing paper use and going digital in their information flows.  For some reason the paperless workplace still does not seem to have traction in most businesses.  

Certainly there have been steps taken to reduce paper, often in places like invoicing and issuing of account statements.  Sometimes it has been in correspondence since the email has definitely overtaken the formal paper letter for much of the daily correspondence of most operations.  Even with these changes the paperless workplace does not seem to be entrenched however.

I sometimes talk about the less paper office instead.  It seems to me that this is achievable in most operations and with some effort it can lead to a substantial reduction in costs and also it can lead to a reduction in time expended carrying out daily transactions.

In a recent blog article John Mancini asks the question, "Is a paper-free workplace possible?". 

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