Fresh Ideas

As we dive into 2019, here’s a look back at the five most popular posts of 2018. Plus, we’ve created a “Hall of Fame” for the two blog posts written by Mike Andrews about full-bleed printing.

Since they were originally written in 2015, they’ve been read and re-read by tens of thousands. To give our other blogs a fighting chance at the top 5, we’ve put those two posts on their own special pedestal. You can read them below.

What are you interested in reading about this year? Let me know in the comments below.

Drumroll, please . . . . .

Here are your top 5 most popular blogs in 2018.

As the calendar turns over to another year, I found Canon’s recent research (Office Insights 2018) into office productivity an interesting read.

As the president of a company that sells and services office equipment, I found two statistics encouraging for our own continued success:

1. One in 3 enterprises print more often than they did a year ago

2. 43% of companies consider multifunction printers critical office technology to keep business running (the 2nd and 3rd most mentioned were laptops at 36% and smartphones at 30%)

As we continue to support our customers with top-of-the-line printers and copiers, those stats show that’s a winning strategy for us.

At the same time, digital transformation is continuing to gain traction as 40% of businesses are scanning more often than the year before.

Let’s dig a bit more into the research and what it means for your business.

When you spend thousands of dollars on a piece of equipment, this is an important question. Of course you want to maximize the ROI from your purchase (or lease). 

This is a loaded question though and the answer, I’m sorry to say, is the same as it often is: it depends.

I will say that with average use and regular maintenance, a mid-range floor copier can operate for about five years and a decade for high-end models or .mid-range model that’s lightly used. 

There are two filters to look at the lifespan of a copier:

Remember when the encyclopedias on your living room shelf held the answers to everything?

Now we have Wikipedia, the crowd-sourced online encyclopedia as accurate as those volumes on the shelf.

We have the Internet with websites for everything under the sun -- not to mention the 2,000,000 million blog posts per day (and then there are all of the infographics, ebooks, pins on Pinterest, videos on YouTube, Facebook updates, Instagram, and someone probably invented a new something as I typed this).

In the office, we have crucial business information spread throughout our offices in paper files stored in filing cabinets or lost on a co-worker’s desk somewhere, in email, in shared drives, in online storage (Dropbox, GoogleDrive), and (if we’re smart) in document management repositories.

I could cite stats for months, but you get the point, information is everywhere and we are drowning in it.

How do you handle this information overload?

Many small and medium businesses struggle with managing their businesses based on paper files and documents.

It doesn’t have to be that way. There are many document management providers -- such as Laserfiche -- who develop document management and workflow software designed to cost-effectively meet the needs of SMBs.

Acquiring a new phone system can be a confusing mess. Our telecommunications implementation specialist, Brenda Schares, takes the confusion out of the process for our customers.

Many of our customers (maybe even you!) don’t know that we offer business phone systems -- including voice over IP.

I’d like to introduce you to our own “Phone Lady.”

Smart businesses are beginning to plot out their plans for growth in 2019 now.

Goals shouldn't be vague wishes either – growth or “better productivity” are as useless as all of those upcoming New Year's resolutions to “eat better” and “lose weight.”

No, your goals need to be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

Without a SMART plan of action, a goal is just another name for “wish” (and just as unlikely to come true).