Johannesburg, 27 Jun 2008
While the philosophies and ideals of a paperless and fully automated office guide the thinking of the IT world, there is no escaping the all-too-real business costs and administration challenges associated with managing an enterprise-wide printing network.
Anyone with any experience in managing such a system understands the reality that managing the printing side of a network is the most challenging and tedious part of an administrator's duties.
That being said, an automated and more administrator-centric solution that allows business to understand the costs and - once understood - control the costs involved in printing, copying and scanning is something that many IT administrators have been wanting for a long time.
The Oc'e solution, whether it is software to manage the entire enterprise's print, copy and scan activities, or a fleet of office printers, is designed with this aim in mind.
It is easy to install, its many features are distributed to the devices automatically and items such as user accounts and permissions are automatically set up by enterprise's email server.
There are central management tools that allow the administrator to control and manage all print, copy and scan devices from a central location, while solutions such as serverless follow-me printing removes an additional layer of administrative burden from the IT department.
In addition, all Oc'e software uses open technologies and isn't linked to any single vendor, which makes it the perfect solution to manage a network that is made up of printing equipment from more than one vendor.
However, the convenient solutions offered by Oc'e don't just hold advantages for the IT administrator. The end-user also benefits from features such as fingerprint scanning to access accounts, an easy to use interface and high quality reproduction, print and copy.
According to Stephen Bell, product manager for Oc'e South Africa's Digital Document Systems: "The notion of the paperless office is based on the ideal of a futuristic office and on the hoped-for advantages in terms of productivity gain, cost-savings, space-savings and easy information sharing. However, as yet there is no device or object that can truly replace paper."
The myth of the true paperless office has been accepted as dead for a long time. However, the office environment is embracing a convergence of the two worlds of paper and digital.
Companies can achieve enormous benefits by archiving their documents digitally: these documents can be readily accessed and edited by users around the world. Document sharing is made cheaper and faster using digital, especially when the recipients are located at different sites, even in different countries.
Bell concludes: "Even though companies are using digital to get to the end product, that end product is ultimately printed out in hard copy."
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