Webmaster's blog

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In an unpublished InfoTrends’ research project conducted slightly more than one year ago, we surveyed the US financial services industry to learn about the adoption rates and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.

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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.

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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:

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By Corey Smith

Last year AIIM released the Records Management Report.

One of the questions that was asked was why people would consider implementing an electronic content (record) management system (often we simply call it document management). I find the results very interesting, but not surprising.

[Click image to enlarge]

The two most important reasons that companies want to implement an electronic document management system are (1) efficiency and productivity and (2) compliance to legal regulations (FACTA, SOX, HIPPA, etc).

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from ScanGuru

Many of the Document Management and ECM System Implementations fail right out of the gate due to several factors. Most of them revolve around planning, and project definition and focus. Below are some key areas that are imperative to a project’s success:

Infrastructure
A huge part of the planning for a DMS/ECM System is examining your organization’s network infrastructure and ensuring it is ready. Implementing a system with inadequate resources can provide wrong end user perceptions. Focus should be placed on the below items:

• PC Clients – the client PC’s should have appropriate horsepower to handle their specific tasks. Obviously, basic search clients will not require extensive resources such as memory or hard drive space, but a scanning or OCR station may.
• Network – It is time to get rid of those hubs your brother in-law gave you, and upgrade to 100MB, or in some cases (at the server), Gigabit technology.
• Server – adequate memory, processor and storage is a necessity.
• Backup- often an overlooked area, planning for system backup, now and in the years beyond is very important.

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by Corey Smith

Leo Piccioli shared with me a chart about the growth of paper prices. He commented that, "every ten years or so a "paperless office" trend starts... and nothing really changes."

[Click image to enlarge]

So, is the "Paperless Office" ever going to come?

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by Corey Smith

How much paper do you use? Do you foresee getting rid of it in the near future?Industry analysts suggest that this will be the year that we’ll start to see the turn from paper to paperless. We have been talking about the paperless office for better than 30 years now. Can this really be the year that we will do away with paper?

Well, that is a lofty goal for this year. But, the analysts do think that the turn toward the reduction in paper will start this year. I think that no one is going to totally eliminate the use of paper, but more and more companies are realizing the benefits of converting an increasing amount of paper into digital files.

So, what is it going to take? I tend to think that document imaging is really about fundamentally changing the way you do business. Fundamentally changing the way you think about your business.

It is all about change. We have to be willing to change the way we do things. If we are not willing to change our strategies and approaches, it will never happen.

And, the only way that we will ever be willing to change our strategies and approaches is if we see a possibility of improvement.

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By Jon Reardon

Because of the proliferation of MFP devices in the office, the accessibility to scanning has increased. Awareness and use of the MFP scanner have risen because of the ease of integrated solutions and openness to share the device. At InfoTrends, we believe that the acceptance of scanning due to this proliferation of MFP devices has exponentially increased scanning activity (the overall pie has grown). More workers in the office are becoming accustomed to scanning Ad Hoc documents; therefore, this is no longer a specialized application in the office environment. As workflow solutions begin to play a greater role in the office environment, scanning and scanner technology are becoming vital elements for knowledge workers. The following interesting statistics are from a recently published study (conducted at the end of 2007 and published in early 2008) from our Image Scanning Trends practice area entitled US Document Image Scanning Report 2007:

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John Mancini, at AIIM, recently posted the 10 Steps to Building an Enterprise Content Management System.

He posted a document that provides detail on the 10 steps you should take in building an ECM or EDMS (Electronic Document Management System) in your organization.

Here is a summary of those steps.

1. Proposing an ECM
2. Project Charter
3. System Scope
4. System Requirements
5. ROI analysis
6. Statement of Work
7. Project plan
8. RFP
9. RFP evaluation
10. Execution and control

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By Jon Reardon

The “green” wave is finally working its way into the daily conversation and consciousness of American business. Although this topic is complex, multi-faceted, and far too sophisticated to be covered adequately in a one time blog entry, I thought I might take this opportunity to focus on one tiny element of business sustainability: document capture and scanning.

Reducing the negative impact of a business on the environment has become an imperative strategic initiative for an ever increasing number of SMB and enterprise class organizations. The methods being used to achieve this goal range from reducing resource usage and implementing carbon offsets to recycling and engaging in many other green activities: this list goes on and on.

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