Managing copiers can suck a lot of time from your day. Did you know existing functionality on your copier can help with that?
Happy Monday! You walk into the office and immediately have to troubleshoot because an unscheduled firmware upgrade decided to play havoc on your users’ copier connections in the office. Aren’t Mondays already hard enough?
You know how it feels to clean your house? How great it feels once you finish and you know it’s something that has to be done, but no one (other than Martha Stewart maybe) actually enjoys doing it? That’s kind of how it feels when the various pieces of office equipment in your business are well managed. You are unnecessarily wasting time if you are experiencing any of the issues below:
- Deploying drivers for your devices
- Have no insight into the status of your devices and are barraged by unexpected maintenance needs and out of toner alerts (without any in stock!)
- Struggle to add users and devices to your print network
- Ineffective enforcement of access and printing policies
- Firmware updates during business hours – causing unexpected machine downtime and frustration
Device Management – Look For These Features
So you’ve realized you’re wasting time – now what? Well, many of the solutions to make your life easier and simplify device management issues exist within the devices themselves. Look for these features:
- Create tasks: Create and schedule tasks to run at set times (e.g., retrieve meters every month on the 1st at 5 PM)
- Error logs: Maintain a log of device error history and export for analysis when needed
- Grouping: Group devices into logical groups, such as Floor1 or HQ
- User Notification: Send notices to IT administrators about device status. Exchange messages with individuals or all connected users to let them know about printing environment changes
- Access Rights: Set up user rights on individual and feature-by-feature level, when required
- List of Devices: Look up all network-registered devices in one location
- Firmware Updates: Download firmware and update immediately or schedule updates, according to settings
- Corporate Address Books: Centrally manage the company address book across multiple devices (in the case of a fleet of devices from multiple manufacturers, you will have to do this individually for each manufacturer’s equipment)
- See Device Status in Real Time: Set up real-time alerts for a variety of device errors – parts missing, door open, ready, etc. – and view all device status from one portal.
Many of the issues throughout this post are addressed by the software available on Canon’s imageRUNNER lineup of copiers (and other manufacturers, like Konica Minolta and Lexmark, offer similar functionality).
If you’re tired of managing your equipment, we can help – let’s talk.
