Leading document imaging and management company Xerox has introduced a series of 5 printers and multifunction products targeted at small and medium sized businesses.   The latest products include: ·        Xerox Phaser 3100MFP- can print, photocopy and scan; priced at about $279 ·        Xerox Phaser 5550- laser printer that speeds printing at a rate of up to 50 pages per minute (ppm); priced at about $1,999 ·        Xerox Phaser 3635 MFP- 35 ppm networked system with security features such as image overwriting, encryption and authentication tools ·        Xerox Phaser 3600 laser printer- prints up to 40 ppm; priced at about $549. The Phaser 3100MFP is the company’s lowest-cost MFP offering print speed up to 21ppm and a host of features including Optical Character Recognition software that converts scanned documents into text-searchable files.The Phaser 5550 laser printer offers easy installation and service and comes with the PhaserSMART, an online troubleshooting tool that helps diagnose and solve potential printing issues, preventing maintenance calls and increasing its reliability. This product produces tabloid-sized prints up to 50 ppm for both single and double-sided pages.

US-based Vision Point of Sale (Vision POS) has upgraded to a new integrated enterprise-wide system to improve its point of sale equipment and service offering to clients with greater responsiveness and better scalability.

The new system will provide access to expanded client sales history reports, offer better ordering functionality and increased order processing features that will speed-up delivery to Vision clients. As this upgrade is to the company’s internal operating system only, there will be no changes to all existing contact information.

“The ERP system that is now in place will help our customers identify and deploy the point of sale solutions they need with more speed and efficiency than we've ever offered before," says Vision President and COO Jeff Nixon.

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countries save computer files with their own personalised names or suffixes, and routinely working on the wrong or out-of-date files.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.”