Document management systems and services provider IKON Office Solutions is being acquired by Ricoh, a leading manufacturer of multifunction products, printers, fax machines and related supplies for about $1.6 billion in cash. IKON will be a subsidiary of Ricoh, once the acquisition process is completed.

The acquisition will bring together IKON's sales and services capabilities and Ricoh's engineering and manufacturing expertise.  

IKON integrates copiers, printers and MFP technologies from leading manufacturers and document management software and systems, to deliver tailored, high-value solutions implemented and supported by its global services organization. Ricoh on the other hand offers a wide range of digital, networked products, including MFPs, printers, fax machines, semiconductor related products and digital cameras.

Thomson Reuters is working with HealthGate Data Corp on a next generation document lifecycle management application to enhance its Order Set Solution, which provides evidence-based order sets with more than 900 titles for 280 medical conditions.

The enhanced application targeted at hospitals is expected to streamline and acceleration the creation, review, management and updating of clinical order set content. Hospitals can then tailor evidence-based order set content to their own institutional protocols. The document management solution will provide versioning controls, alerts, collaboration, and review tools.

To boost its operational efficiency and free-up document storage space, Cornwall College is using a document management and imaging software from Version One.

By tightly integrating the software with the college’s Distinction QL accounting system, Cornwall will be able to store about 200,000 documents each year including invoices, statements, academic certificates and personnel records. The college is reportedly implementing the document management solutions in ten sites.

The amount of time savings with the new system can be enormous as currently the college does about 60000 purchase invoices each year that now don’t require to go through the paper-based approvals. Moreover, the software will also reduce data entry needs and thus contribute significantly to eliminate data entry errors.

According to an independent report titled ‘Document Mayhem in the Netherlands and the Nordics’  commissioned by enterprise content management company, TOWER Software, "the habits of employees in the Netherlands and the Nordics are worse than their peers in the UK and Republic of Ireland (ROI) in terms of computer file management."  The report points out that more employees from those countries save computer files with their own personalised names or suffixes, and routinely working on the wrong or out-of-date files. As a result, these employees are also almost twice as likely to call, or be called by a colleague whilst off sick or on holiday to track down computer file information.

Consider these staggering figures from the press release: Almost half (46%) of the Dutch and Nordic employees, compared to around one third (34%) of those in the UK and ROI have spent time working on the wrong or out-of-date version of a computer file because colleagues have not saved it correctly. A quarter (26%) think this has resulted in people in their organisation unknowingly presenting the wrong version of information to colleagues, management, suppliers and/or customers at least very six months, or more frequently. This compares to just 10% in the UK.

Obviously, such instances are bound to cause disruptions in the office environment and have a significant impact on an organization’s efficiency. In fact the report says that it also affects office harmony and people relations.  Emphasizing the importance of document management/ information management in today’s organizations, David Oates, Vice President for TOWER Software across EMEA says, “Information management should be a corporate competency; from paper files, to email and computer-based documents. While not all employees feel the daily pressure of issues such as risk mitigation, compliance and regulation, the efficiency and cost-saving benefits of effective knowledge sharing is well documented.”

Ricoh has introduced the latest version of GlobalScan 3.0, which is its document capture and routing system. Being compatible with several Ricoh MFPs, GlobalScan 3.0 allows organizations to manage high-volume document distribution more effectively and securely.

Local MFPs can be made into a key component of document workflow with GlobalScan 3.0 as users can easily navigate document capture, management, storage, and global distribution. Moreover, there is no need for desktop scanners since it can connect up to 250 MFPs through one server. Historically paper-based documents can now easily be tracked and integrated into digital files, with all the functions of the document capture system easily accessible from the control panel o the MFP.

GlobalScan 3.0 comes with optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities; compression of large documents by up to 100 times is another very attractive feature. Likewise colour scanned documents can be compressed upto 100 times without loss of image quality. These features contribute to heavy cost savings for organizations.

GlobalScan 3.0 is built on the .NET platform for improved reliability and security.