The Datamax Thinking Blog

Thought-leading communication is shared. Key decisions are made. Innovations change the game entirely. But to borrow a tired, old advertising cliché, the customer must still come first.

We can learn a lot from our own history, as well as those around us. It’s true in politics, in pop culture, and certainly in business.

By developing – and deploying – enterprise-wide print strategies now, businesses can over time, through the eight methodical steps, make a positive impact on the environment and their bottom line.

Texas Politician Rick Green had this signature witticism, ‘"That’s Green, like money!" Being "green," of course, also refers to corporate programs launched to help organizations be environmentally proactive.

What Green – and many businesses today – may not know, is that both initiatives (the environment and your bottom line) can be achieved simultaneously through a series of Printing Best Practices.

Canon’s UVgel technology, as featured in the Océ Colorado Wide Format Series, is retaining the advantages of prevailing printer technologies while eliminating many of the compromises.

What constitutes a game-changer?

Atari’s ball-swatting back and forth game Pong spawned a $22 billion home gaming industry. Michael Jordan leapt from the free throw line for a spell-bounding dunk. The IBM PC Model turned personal computers from a hobby into a legitimate business tool.

Game-changers exist across all professional endeavors. They introduce a new direction and have immediate impact. They breed change. They strike fear.  They literally change the game. Print technology is no exception. Enter Canon’s signature UVgel technology.

As your business game plans for every scenario that could come your way with a Business Continuity and/or Disaster Recovery strategy, thorough planning is essential. Communication is essential. And testing your plan is of utmost importance.

Legendary Dallas Cowboys Coach (and also B-17 Pilot) Tom Landry, the author of the Doomsday Defense, was the consummate planner.

Unequivocally calm, cool and collected under even the most overwhelming of circumstances, Landry carried with him a philosophy that if his players executed the plans he laid out for them, if coaches stuck to a rigid, to-the-minute itinerary every week, the final outcome would be favorable.

Nearly a third of all respondents (32%) said that they had never received cybersecurity training from their workplace but should have.

Healthcare today has its share of gaps: Gaps in healthcare access, gaps in the treatment of chronic diseases, and gaps in communication between patient and provider.

But what about the existing gaps in a medical facility's IT security plan?

UCaaS is an “all-in-one” solution that accommodates a transformative workplace. It merges a full-feature phone system, team chat and messaging, video conferencing, screen sharing, file collaboration, and more, and unifies them under one platform.

Cloud formations are developing fast. So much so, one could say it’s raining cloud application acronyms today.

“As a service” abbreviations pour on and on – you’ve heard of them: Desktop as a Service (DaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Hardware as a Service (HaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Monitoring as a Service (MaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), to name a few.

Considering a Managed IT agreement? Go straight to the partner you're looking to outsource to and ask them these five questions. These inquiries will reveal both their capabilities and what your expectations should be moving forward.

We are a nation of outsourcers. From groceries to household chores to business game plans, we hesitate little in handing it over to someone who specializes in x, y, or z.

It's an old, universal truth: effective communication is key to team and organizational success. Without adapting to more intuitive, better integrated communication and collaboration tools, organizations will continue to hit the same communication barriers again and again. 

There’s this joke about millennials. Give a millennial a smartphone and he’ll live for a day… any longer than that and he’ll become a mindless, soulless, social media zombie.

Yes, it’s an all-too-common dig — a boomer scoffing at the 20-something across the room with his face buried in his phone. But all jokes aside, the next generation of communication systems and devices is transforming the way we work. With millennials now making up the largest generation in the U.S. labor force, the definitions of both “workplace” and “workday” are becoming steadily more hazy.

Is the information on your devices open to anyone who happens to walk inside your office? If so, it can certainly backfire on your organization, and blow the door open for leaking sensitive information.

An open door policy at your organization may be a great initiative for encouraging openness and transparency in the company. But it can also backfire if misused by employees.

Do you have a similar open door policy on your copier? Is the information on your devices open to anyone who happens to walk inside your office? If so, it can certainly backfire on your organization, and blow the door open for leaking sensitive information. It might be time for a change in policy. 

Weeds in your print environment are equally destructive. Excessive printing by users; poor tracking of devices; and even inadequate security policies that can become harmful to your organization.

Pulling weeds – it’s an arduous, thankless and literally painful task.

Albeit, a completely necessary one for a healthy garden or lawn environment. Weeds block out sunlight and steal water. They crowd out your crop space and often camouflage harmful pests or disease. If left unattended, of course, weeds only get worse.