Fresh Ideas

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).

"Every dollar spent on printing involves another $9 to manage it."*

Print costs are the third largest office expenditure for most companies. Regular readers will be familiar with the financial arguments I’ve made in favor of trimming those costs with managed print services (check out this infographic for a high-level visual overview).

Beyond dollars and cents, the other hidden cost of managing your own printing environment is time. Staff time ordering supplies and requesting maintenance. Lost time from copiers going down without preventive maintenance. Lost IT time spent troubleshooting issues.

Here are four freedoms that turning to MPS can provide to your office.

It should be impossible to ignore security challenges today - though many offices do continue to try.

We’re bombarded with commercials, ads, radio spots, articles in the newspaper and magazines, podcasts, news programs, and even this blog (sometimes) about various security issues.

Most of this content focuses on securing networks, which is a huge, complex, and important topic. We’ve focused on the issue of copier security.

I’d like to bring the focus down to a level we’re all familiar with -- the humble document. We all work with documents. Paper or digital, sensitive documents need to be secured.

Here are six ways documents could be accessed by the wrong people -- and what to do about it.