HP today introduced two digital press solutions with capabilities that improve photo printing quality and color consistency.

The company also announced that output for HP Indigo presses has received a Wilhelm Imaging Research (WIR) Display Permanence rating of approximately 45 years, the first of its kind for a digital press.⁽¹⁾

The new press solutions are designed for photofinishers, professional photographers, yearbook publishers, print service providers and other graphic arts professionals.

• The HP Indigo WS6000p offers professional portrait output quality as a high-quality, low-cost replacement to silver-halide systems.
• The enhanced HP Indigo W7200 Digital Press improves color management and consistency for high-volume printing of photo specialty products, including photo books.

HP additionally launched a partner solution from M-photo to manage professional lab workflow for HP Indigo presses and silver-halide output devices. HP also announced the general availability of the ARTtrust self-certification system for photographers and artists using HP Designjet Z Series Professional Photo Printers.

“Digital has crossed the gap between traditional and digital photofinishing in terms of quality, productivity and consistency, and now digital printing surpasses silver halide for photo permanence,” said Christopher Morgan, senior vice president, Graphics Solutions Business, HP. “HP’s solutions are accelerating the shift to digital, creating new business opportunities for print service providers, publishers and photographers.” continue reading...

HP today introduced a records management solution that enables customers to significantly reduce the business risks associated with the growing regulatory compliance and legal discovery demands.

HP TRIM 7 – an advanced records management solution built on 24 years of experience and best practices – enables organizations to transparently manage all of their Microsoft SharePoint Server records in a single environment, regardless of the source. This includes documents as well as information found in SharePoint Server blogs, wikis, discussions, forms, calendars and workflows.

Widespread adoption of SharePoint Server provides the opportunity to consolidate and simplify the management of content stored across multiple SharePoint instances. HP TRIM 7 enables the transparent capture, search and management of all types of physical and electronic business information, including Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the upcoming SharePoint Server 2010.

“Organizations today need solutions to manage the explosion of large volumes of information,” said Mark Gilbert, research vice president, Gartner. “New solutions are growing rapidly for authoring and managing enterprise content in various formats and sources, and this trend is truly changing the way organizations do business.”

“The explosion in Content 2.0 blogs, wikis and discussions creates new information management challenges for organizations trying to meet an escalating set of regulation,” said Jonathan Martin, vice president and general manager, Information Management Solutions, HP. ”HP TRIM allows customers to marry records management best practices and governance with dynamic collaboration platforms such as SharePoint.” continue reading...

All too often, we hear and even use terms assuming others know exactly what we mean. One term used in the document industry is workflow- but what does it mean?

According to Wikipedia

A workflow consists of a sequence of connected steps. It is a depiction of a sequence of operations...

The flow being described often refers to a document that is being transferred from one step to another.

A workflow is a model to represent real work for further assessment, e.g., for describing a reliably repeatable sequence of operations. More abstractly, a workflow is a pattern of activity enabled by a systematic organization of resources, defined roles and mass, energy and information flows, into a work process that can be documented and learned. Workflows are designed to achieve processing intents of some sort, such as physical transformation, service provision, or information processing. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workflow ) continue reading...

Everyone knows how bad the economy was this past year and this downturn caused many companies to put their IT strategies on hold. Others however, saw this as an opportunity to be proactive and begin implementing automation and moving forward with new ways of getting the job done. As we head into the New Year, look at these strategies to think about re-organizing and working smarter. continue reading...

1. Be proactive! While companies need to react quickly to industry trends and changing economic and world environments, they also need to formulate strategies for the future. Think about creating a team who will think ahead and make sure the company will get where it wants to go in the next few years.
2. Follow a business strategy roadmap. Don’t just jump blindly expecting the technology to magically work for you. Build a business strategy that will clarify and outline the issues you’re trying to solve. Be sure that your company is starting with a good foundation for their infrastructure that can be further built upon.
3. You don’t have to implement everything at once. In fact, it is much more practical automate your business according to a strategic plan—focus on what needs attention first. Look at your industry specific government regulations to see how they expect a company to handle information management.
4. Don’t wait to “play it safe” and have other companies experiment with new technology. If you stand back and wait for another company to make the first step and prove automation as a valuable investment, the next generation of technology will already have hit the business world. Your company will remain one step behind other innovating companies and will lose competitive edge.
5. Think about your return on investment (ROI). If you’re worried about staffing and hiring issues, realize that once automation is implemented, people used to working manually with documents can be re-deployed to other valuable tasks. While automation still needs staff to run it, the amount of personnel can be greatly reduced. This feeds right into the ROI. Create a flowchart and see how much faster your product can hit the market with new technology. That’s savings.