Smart Tech for Small Biz covers IT news, views, and product info with the small business angle in mind. It is also a Guide on how small businesses can balance keeping within a small IT budget and getting the best value for their money. This month, the focus is on Printing needs in small to medium-sized offices.

James E. Gaskin has been helping small and medium sized businesses use technology intelligently since 1986. Write him at james@gaskin.com.

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Smart Tech for Small Biz covers IT news, views, and product info with the small business angle in mind. It is also a Guide on how small businesses can balance keeping within a small IT budget and getting the best value for their money. This month, the focus is on Printing needs in small to medium-sized offices.

James E. Gaskin has been helping small and medium sized businesses use technology intelligently since 1986. Write him at james@gaskin.com.

by James Gaskin

  • The Zen of Modern Printing

    Posted Jan 29, 2010 - 05:23 pm

    After six weeks focusing on printing, I have come to a realization about printing on paper in a world of instant digital communications: do less the old way, but more the smart way. We're not finished with printing, even 570 years after Gutenberg invented movable type, or 11 centuries after the Chinese printed with carved woodblocks. Information on paper still drives us, despite the promise of Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPad.

  • How To Master Excel Spreadsheet Printing

    Posted Jan 28, 2010 - 12:48 pm

    You slave over cell after cell after cell in your spreadsheet until it's perfect. When it comes time to print out that perfection, you get blank pages, missing sections, and weird formatting. You can blame your printer, but the problem is almost always in Excel. Jen Darr of PC Helps sent the details for this lesson.

  • How To Create Impact with Colored Paper

    Posted Jan 27, 2010 - 12:12 pm

    Teachers use this trick, and Hollywood productions have an elaborate set of rules for this. Yes, a seemingly minor detail like changing the color of a few pages of a proposal can make a huge impact. The words matter most on a proposal, of course, but putting important information on different colored paper magnifies that impact.

  • How To Create a New Print Style for Outlook

    Posted Jan 26, 2010 - 12:55 pm

    This tip comes from Jen Darr of PC Helps Support and will make sure you know what you're getting when you hit Print inside Outlook. Jen offers great advice on how to create a new print style with a different page size for your Outlook printouts. While I discourage printing e-mail as a matter of course, many times you do need to print something, so you may as well create the output that works best for you.

  • How To Ease Into Document Management

    Posted Jan 25, 2010 - 01:16 pm

    Small business owners and managers have a common reaction when someone, usually a salesperson, suggests going paperless and jumping into electronic document management: they cover their ears, start screaming “la la la I can't hear you,” and run out of the room. So don't say “electronic document management” but say “use our scanner to reduce clutter and save money.” Bosses pull their hands away from their ears when they hear “save money” and you can leverage the scanner on your MFP to ease into document management, I mean, reduce clutter.

  • How To Save Money Proofing Color Pages

    Posted Jan 22, 2010 - 06:17 pm

    Working on complex color documents means wasting time and paper trying to make the beauty you see on the screen translate to a beautiful page coming out of your printer. Even when you have a low cost per color page, each mistake, er, step on the path to perfection, costs money. Here's one way to keep proofing without costing a fortune.

  • How To Setup a Printer Pool

    Posted Jan 21, 2010 - 11:54 am

    Too many companies panic when one printer goes down. If your company relies heavily on one printer, and no printing means no work gets done, it's time to jump into the printer pool. Hint: you don't have to take your clothes off for a dip in the printer pool.

  • How To Leverage the Tactile Lure of Good Paper

    Posted Jan 19, 2010 - 12:30 pm

    Last time we mentioned printing with reduced margins for internal use, with a warning not to cut corners on materials for clients. Save a penny, lose a project? Not a good idea. Today let's talk about leveraging the tactile lure of high quality paper to reel in business.

  • How To Pack More On A Printed Page

    Posted Jan 18, 2010 - 12:04 pm

    One idea to help save some money on printing came from Jim Lippie of Staples Network Services in response to reading this series. His idea? Reduce the size of the margins on your pages, effectively increasing the number of words you can print. Good idea, so let's see where it's appropriate.

  • How To Print Without a Computer

    Posted Jan 15, 2010 - 11:54 am

    Everyone grew up with personal printers attached to personal computers, so we naturally believe a computer must be part of the printing equation. Like so many things we learned growing up, that truth has “matured” to the point it's almost an untruth. There are at least two easy ways to print on many modern printers without a computer: memory card reader slots, and PictBridge.

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The nature of the blade platform makes system management, monitoring and provisioning easy and efficient. Access this resource to learn how blade migration will save your data center time and money while increasing performance.

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One of the key strategies that IT teams are pursuing to reduce capital costs while boosting asset utilization and employee productivity is the transition to highly virtualized data centers. However, IDC finds that expectations for further boosts in IT asset use and operational efficiency often surpass the actual results for a variety of reasons. These problems can quickly overwhelm any hoped-for benefits as the scope of virtual server deployment expands.

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HP CloudSystem Matrix: Managing at a Higher Level

This white paper examines IT management challenges from a fundamental and system standpoint. In addition, it introduces the concept of a service-oriented and automated approach to IT management.

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Five Myths of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing continues to grow in popularity among the IT industry. And more businesses are advertising that they are the front runner for providing the best cloud services. However, in this race to remain top dog, IT pros remain unsure of what cloud computing is and the benefits it can bring to their organization.

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