The Datamax Thinking Blog

uniFLOW is a powerful print and document management solution that helps businesses secure their printing, control costs, and streamline workflows—all while reducing IT burdens. 

If your small or medium-sized business (SMB) is struggling with unsecured printing, high print costs (and printing volumes), or inefficient workflows, you're not alone. Many companies overlook how much time, money, and security risk is tied to unmanaged printing. Unmanaged print devices can become a lot like herding cats.

The short answer is that cloud services create new opportunities. Print management is no exception.

Just as migration is a necessary journey toward available resources at any given time, businesses, too, are increasingly finding new capabilities in the cloud.

Cloud migration is soaring. Flexera’s “2020 State of the Cloud Report” says that 93% of enterprises use some form of multi-cloud services, up from 84% in 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing Work From Home mandates only rushed the migration for many.

Save time and a walk back to your computer, scan a document and share via email directly from your copier.

We may all live in a digital world but, even so, at some point you’ll receive physical pieces of paper and need to send them to someone electronically.

Accomplishing this always seems to involve a small amount of irritation. For whatever reason those few extra steps tend to make the process seem daunting (even when it’s really not).

Call Out: Inefficient office equipment costs you more to “keep the lights on.”

You turn the lights off when you leave a room (or have motion sensors do it for you), adjust your cooling and heating to economize during non-work hours, but are you taking advantage of the energy-saving opportunities of your office equipment?

If you’re scanning and then manually adding documents into SharePoint, you don’t need to be.

Many of you use SharePoint as a collaboration and document management tool for your office (either as a standalone product, in the cloud, or in conjunction with Office 365).

SharePoint is a secure place for you to store, organize, share, and access information from many devices and locations.

Print tracking tools help you understand where you’re incurring costs, so you can get them under control.

It’s a question we are asked often: “Can I track how much my office prints?” Office print tracking captures and records information about your office’s printing behaviors.

You can’t plan for what you can’t measure. And not knowing the total number, length, etc. of what documents are being printed and by which department and individual makes it difficult to ensure that printing costs are under control.

Play follow the leader with your print jobs on any of your office’s networked copiers.

Called pull, push, or follow me printing; this productivity functionality allows employees to roam the office and print from a convenient device.

Have a large print job, but don’t want to carry it from your desk up two floors to the big conference room? Hit print, select the device closest to your meeting,

Use your office copier to scan documents directly to cloud storage for quick and simple access later.

Even if you don’t follow technology at all, you’ve heard of “the cloud.” Often mentioned with a touch of reverence and a hint that the cloud will solve your technology challenges, cloud services really can bring huge personal and business productivity improvements when used correctly. 

Imagine saving your thoughts to your cloud-based storage, retrieving it via the app, and printing when you were ready.

In an office, everyone and everything needs to be as productive as possible. Your copier already has many productivity benefits, but did you know you can now extend those benefits with an app?

There’s an “app for that” on most newer copiers, though most companies don’t realize it. Take a look at your multifunction printer (MFP) and navigate to the apps screen to find them.