Fortunately, there’s help. Hewlett-Packard offers some valuable links to resources on its Web site that can assist solution providers in understanding document opportunities in five key SMB industries and gather information for crafting sales messages to individual clients.

The site provides information about real estate, finance and accounting, health, retail, and legal. In addition to stories about news and trends, the break-out sections also include descriptions of vertical-specific software, information about relevant hardware, and templates for in-house marketing products.

Ink-based printers and MFPs are also capable of high print quality and fast speeds, while accommodating a wide variety of output media, InfoTrends adds.

“Most of today’s office customers feel that color printing is too expensive,” InfoTrends says in Opportunities for Ink-Based Marking Technologies in the Office Imaging Market. “Considering current customer needs and the benefits of inkjet technology, it makes sense to consider an ink-based page printer for the office. An ink-based page printer could address many of the barriers that are prohibiting growth in office color pages today.”

Because Xerox plans to offer DocuShare Express through the same channels as its other SMB products, solution providers could benefit by having a new document-management product to offer its customer base.

The need for greater workflow efficiencies and growing government regulatory requirements mean many SMBs face similar document challenges as larger organizations. “Finding documents when you need them at the moment you need them isn’t easy," says Paul Gleason, vice president of small and medium business for Xerox. But pairing an MFP with document-management programs that can search the contents of documents is “absolutely critical for smaller businesses," he adds.

DocuShare Express illustrates a larger trend within the company to offer more “down market” applications for smaller companies, with a stable of solutions that also includes X-Solutions ScanFlowStore, Gleason says.

Here are a few bullet points excerpted from “SharePoint Report 2008.” First, under the category of business advice, CMS recommends that users:

• Do Not Assume SharePoint Is “Free”
• Do Recognize SharePoint’s Technical Complexity
• Do Not Over-engineer Your Environment
• Do Consider Working with a Microsoft Partner
• Do Not Get Carried Away with a Partner’s Enthusiasm
• Do Plan Any Migration Very Carefully

CMS’s technical advice for solution providers and others who must grapple with SharePoint’s inner workings includes these do’s and don’ts:

• Do Recognize Soft and Hard Technical Limits
• Do Not Plan for a Federated Storage Architecture

All of which shows that solution providers who currently or in the future will offer document-management solutions need to understand this market presence whether they become certified SharePoint providers or not.

“In the past, people would get that one page printed with just a URL at the bottom. That’s a piece of paper you are just throwing away,” says Tom Codd, director of marketing for Hewlett-Packard’s Worldwide Print Sales and Services Organization. “With HP Smart Web Printing you can fix that page-break problem, plus you can clip just the contents you want off the Web page so you don’t print all the borders and the ads that sometimes result in additional pages being printed.”

Users can also resize, rearrange, and combine the various clippings into a single electronic document prior to producing a hard copy.

End users may appreciate having their solution provider point them to the free application, which adds a new button to the Web browser’s menu bar. Offering the tip may also serve as a good conversation starter for discussing bigger issues, such as green printing and how tech refresh can cut costs at a time when belt tightening is the norm.

They’re useful words to live by as the printing industry transitions to managed print services and on-demand printing, two trends that point out how end users increasingly look for ways to complete important tasks with as little intervention on their part as possible.

The words of Levitt (who’s also credited with popularizing the term “globalization”) live on for Robin Wessel, director of product marketing for desktop products at Xerox. “It’s the output that customers need, not necessarily the devices” that create it, he says.

His recommendation for how solution providers can apply this logic to sales calls is to look at how and where pages are being generated. That could be everything from high-profile workgroup printers to stealthier backroom copiers and desktop inkjets.

Locating all of these document creation end points can strike gold. “That’s how you’ll find opportunities to provide value and improvements in the customer’s cost of ownership,” he adds.

Solution providers can use the tool as part of their green sales strategies to evaluate Xerox hardware as well as devices from other OEMs.

Prior to working with Xerox, Northrop Grumman maintained more than 2,000 printers and the hundreds of MFPs and stand-alone copiers. Xerox Office Services helped the firm “right size” to fewer than 1,100 devices.

Users enter such metrics as equipment specifications and usage patterns present in the existing printing infrastructure. From this baseline, it then estimates the potential savings of new configurations. The calculator uses proprietary algorithms and document-assessment research to deliver its fleet-data findings. It can also show the impact of related conservation measures, such as duplex printing, Xerox says.

"Xerox's Sustainability Calculator has been helping us measure how far we've come, where we are today, and where we need to focus our efforts in the future," said Northrop Grumman’s Kraig Scheyer, vice president of administrative services, in a statement.

The top award--the IPG Solutions Business Partner of the Year--went to the TROY Group (http://www.troygroup.com/), a provider of on-demand printing solutions and maker of secure workgroup printers built on an HP LaserJet foundation.

According to HP, TROY earned the award based on its sales results, marketing investments, contribution to HP’s enterprise ecosystem, and regional expansion activities.

Also honored was Kofax Inc. (http://www.kofax.com/), a document-management systems vendor, which received the Outstanding Partner Award for New Development Initiatives.

Perceptive Software Inc. (http://www.imagenow.com/), creator of document-management, imaging, and workflow software, was given the Outstanding Partner Award for Best Sales Force Engagement.

Also recognized was application-development tool vendor Oberon, which was named Outstanding Partner Award for Software Customization.

That’s because Xerox is continuing to see strong revenue performance for services and consumables. For example, while total revenues rose 8 percent in the quarter, post-sale revenues climbed 10 percent.

Chief executive Anne Mulcahy highlighted the benefits of long-term contracts in a prepared statement. “Our annuity-based global business led to steady revenue growth this quarter. While the U.S. economy creates challenges for our business with large enterprises, we’re seeing consistent positive performance in the small and mid-size business market,” Mulcahy added.

In addition, the company said it’s seeing strong demand for document-management services, as well as for color revenues, which rose 11 percent.

Here at Printing and Imaging Solutions we’re working on a new Insights story that will outline the pitfalls of informal approaches, especially for private sector companies that are bound by new eDiscovery rules that went into effect last year. In that story, we quote Jim Murphy, research director for AMR Research, saying “you’d think that people would have gotten their arms around [the new rules] by now. But they really haven’t.”

Fortunately, solution providers can help their customers move beyond the cavalier and dangerous approach that appears to plague the federal government. At the core of these solutions are multifunction products (MFPs), document-management programs, enterprise search modules, and tools for records management.

It’s also important for solution providers to remind customers that eDiscovery compliance isn’t just about conforming to some complex and abstract rules. It can also mean concrete business benefits. “This is not a quixotic battle," the FCW story points out. "If done right, it should help agencies tap into the wealth of information they already have to accomplish their missions more effectively.”

Experts say vein scans are harder to fake than digital fingerprints and don’t carry the negative connotations of being a law enforcement tool.

With current vein scanning systems, people move their palm over a thin cube that emits infrared light that is absorbed by hemoglobin, the Journal says. The scanner captures the vein patterns, which are stored in a database for matching subsequent vein scans.

Although vein scanners aren’t ready for general business use, they’re a symbol of the ongoing evolution of biometric devices for reliable identity management. The need is great for MFPs and printers, for everything from stemming the misuse of color resources to blocking access to electronic information accessible through document-management systems.

Biometric technology may never eliminate the threat of data thieves, but new innovations are making security easier for end users tired of plugging in passwords. They’re also helping security-conscious companies continue their competition against ever-resourceful hackers.

But does everyone – large or small organizations; public or private organizations – want to buy imaging and printing products via a managed print services? And, the type or size of the organization does not necessarily define how they want to buy.

Organizations buy technology in a variety of ways – discrete transactions to integrated solutions. Many times they want to just buy a printer or an MFP or a service contact in a single simple individual transaction. Sometimes the organizations want to buy via a bundled hardware and services transaction. At the far end of the spectrum is a fully integrated managed print services solution with document management software applications driven by the organization’s defined business strategy.

The total available market for imaging and printing technology encompasses the complete spectrum of how organizations want to buy. Depending on how much of the available market you want to address will determine the breadth of products and selling strategies you choose to offer.

Does every reseller – large or small – want to sell and support managed print services? And, if they do, how much of their business will be focused on selling and supporting managed print services? And, how do they start?

Buying and selling managed print services can create an organizational or business discontinuity. Closing the gap takes a logical and strategic commitment from the buyer and the seller.

Before that was possible, “only a few people in a given organization would end up using [content management systems] on a consistent basis,” notes Jim Murphy, research director for AMR Research. “What we’ve seen lately is a richer interaction [among general users] over the Web in terms of technology. They have become more savvy about these tools.”

This, combined with what Murphy calls “a pent up need” for better document version controls across enterprises, is resulting in document-management systems with straightforward interfaces that hide some of the technical challenges of managing electronic documents.

But now Web 2.0 and other collaboration tools are complicating the drive for simplicity. “When you have things like blogs and wikis, where everybody in the world can publish to the Web, it’s so accessible it’s ridiculous,” Murphy says. “So companies are now saying they want to be able to leverage that usability, but they still need to control it, [in part because of] legal risks.”

Solution providers can help clients balance collaboration and control with tools available for ensuring security, compliance, and worker productivity. In addition, solution providers can help customers formulate a policy that restricts employees from accessing the Facebook Web site, blogs, and wikis that aren’t directly related to company business.

At the same time, companies can give their staff access to collaboration outlets that are sanctioned by the organization. “They can tell workers, ‘You can use this tool as long as long as it’s behind the firewall,” Murphy says. “There are various ways of approaching [social collaboration]. Some companies are very locked down in terms of what they allow. Some companies are extremely open and just kind of let it go. The answer should be somewhere in between, but it’s hard to find what that [balance is] right now.”

For networked printers and MFPs, these tools include technologies for controlling access to the devices and limiting how and where data can be distributed via e-mail and other send features. To protect data stored on the hard drives of these devices, advocate the use of encryption software to keep information safe from prying eyes. And use applications for methodically overwriting any data that no longer needs to be stored on printers or MFPs.

“Say to your customers, ‘Spend time to understand what the risks are, and understand what the threats are that you need to protect against. And then turn on the right set of controls to protect yourself against those threats,’” he explains. “When customers do that, security becomes much more of an exercise in risk management, with process discipline around it, rather than just something you react to out of fear.”

Xerox also established a security Web site with patch updates for its products and additional advice on locking down printers and MFPs. See www.xerox.com/security.

Solution providers may be able to reap four times more margin with this alternative approach since it relies less on slim hardware margins, according to Shell Haffner, worldwide solid-ink product manager for Xerox. The plan also addresses a growing market concern that consumables costs are too high and allows solution providers to sell total cost of ownership (TCO) versus scrambling to undercut a competitor's hardware prices, he adds.

“This approach is something a solution provider can have in the toolkit to convince customers that color can be a good deal,” says Haffner. “Some companies may be attracted by the lower hardware price, but they are paying for it in the supplies, and now they are actually starting to realize this.”

Haffner adds that over a four-year period, end users can save 50 percent when they factor in supplies and hardware for the Phaser devices. “With solid-ink products, resellers now can add their solutions on top of a great story about saving money, which gives them another benefit that they can portray to their customers,” says Haffner. “The raw printing costs are much lower, so that makes the solution that much better.”