This month, we asked a few questions that would let you get to know Omar Davis:

How long have you worked at Halsey & Griffith?
I have been working for Halsey & Griffith for seven years now.

What areas do you service?
My service area is Ft. Lauderdale, but I help out other technicians throughout Broward and Dade county when they need me.

What is your favorite thing about being a Halsey & Griffith Service Technician?
My favorite thing about being a Halsey service technician is the fact that there is an open door policy with everyone here, including management. I can talk to Mr. Siemon or Mr. Wilkins at anytime as well as with the supervisors, technicians and the other employees. I feel like we are a family.

What has been your biggest challenge out in the field and how did you resolve it?
Early in my career as a service technician, I was covering an area for a senior tech and had a service call for a Ricoh Pro906 which was a high volume copier. The machine had a service code that was related to the toner recycling unit. I was able to use the service manual to figure out how the unit works and then pull apart the entire recycling system to find and fix the problem and then reassemble the unit.

Have you always been tech savvy?  When did you know that you had an aptitude for maintaining complex machinery?
When I first started I was more computer savvy than anything else. But with the experience I gained from working on different machinery I found myself becoming very skilled at fixing and maintaining complex equipment.

What’s the one tip you would give customers to keep their machines running their best?
The one tip I would give to customers is to try to keep paper clips and staples from getting into the machine, and to try to resist the urge to take the machine apart themselves. If there is a problem that requires opening and removing parts from the machine, call us right away.

What do you like to do in your spare time?
I am happily married with kids so I spend a lot of time doing family activities. When I’m not with the family, you can usually find me watching sports like basketball, football or baseball.

We feel your pain and have overhauled our meter request system to make submitting meters easier on you. Sign up now for our new email request system and you will receive as few as one email per billing cycle, no matter how many machines you have on contract. Simply follow the link you receive in your new meter request email to enter the meters online, and you can be assured you will not be bothered with a reminder email.

Sign up now and see just how easy and fast meter submissions can be!

Have you ever needed service, but couldn’t find the time to call in to our dispatchers? Now you can put up a service call anytime day or night from your personal online H&G account. You can access your H&G account from your desktop, iPad or even your iPhone to place service calls, order toner and supplies, or check your account history.

Sign up now and see how much easier it is to be an H&G customer!

The cost of these sorts of “paperless” solutions have come down drastically in the last decade, even as the technologies themselves have become more powerful. The conveniences and efficiencies afforded by document management technology have never been more attainable for small and mid-sized businesses. And the business scenarios that can benefit from converting to a paperless environment are varied and many.

Before you add new office space, for instance, you should consider how much more cost effective it would be to reclaim the space you already have from your paper file storage. Before you hire another administrative employee, you should consider the time savings afforded by a small investment in paperless workflow. If you are planning an office move, you would be astounded how much less it will cost to move a paperless office.

In a paper world, files are often removed from the filing cabinet and taken to an employee’s desk. Any other person who needs that file will be perplexed to find it not in the filing cabinet, and may spend an inordinate amount of time tracking it down. In a paperless world, the files don’t need to leave the filing cabinet to be “worked on”. Multiple people can access the same files at the same time.

In a paper world, your files are always at risk from fire, flood or hurricane damage. However unlikely disaster may seem, the consequences of complete destruction of all of your businesses paper files would be devastating. In a paperless world, you can take your documents with you when you leave the office in the form of a backup, or have them replicated to a second facility. With proper backup precautions, the chance of loss of files approaches zero.

In a paper world, your company information is only as secure as your least trustworthy employee. Short of camera systems and locks, there are few ways to prevent sensitive information from being distributed without your knowledge. In the paperless world, you can control access to your documentation, right down to who has rights to print and/or email your files. What’s more, the paperless world will keep track of every time your documents were printed, emailed or exported. Your information security is still in the hands of your people, but the audit trail will help you discover behaviors that might be detrimental to your company’s future.

In a competitive world, all organizations need to look for efficiency gains at every opportunity. Now is the best time to take a closer look at the benefits of document management, and what a paperless environment can do for your business.

Unfortunately, a form of telemarketing fraud designed to take advantage of the prevalence of these toner-inclusive contracts has been preying on businesses large and small for many years. We call these fraudsters “toner pirates”.

Toner pirates typically take advantage of unwitting and often new employees at an office that don’t understand how their service contract works. The toner pirates will often misrepresent themselves as the customer’s regular office provider. They likely will have called the office before to obtain equipment serial numbers, and to learn the manufacturer and model of the equipment installed in advance. They may know the names of key personnel at the victim’s business and drop names to establish credibility. Having gained the customer’s trust through misrepresentation, they then proceed to try to sell them supplies.

A popular ploy in this scam is the “one-time deal”. We often hear of the fraudulent telemarketer claiming that toner prices are going up soon, imploring the victim to buy now to save money. This is particularly dubious because the toner they are selling on the phone is already included in the victim’s legitimate service contract. Sometimes an order of supplies nobody ever ordered will show up at the office with an invoice and an employee’s name on it. On those ocassions, the company will even receive threatening and sometimes profane phone calls to try to get the victim to pay.

Fortunately, you can avoid being fooled by toner pirates. Never give out information over the phone regarding your office equipment, employee names or addresses. We at Halsey & Griffith already know the make, model and serial number of your equipment. If someone calls claiming to be us asking for these sorts of details, it’s most likely a toner pirate trying to commit telemarketing fraud.

For more information on how to avoid becoming a victim of telemarketing fraud, and how you can fight back if you suspect you have experienced fraud, go to the Business Technology Associations website.

Google Apps is a good example. Until very recently, no Ricoh MFP could meet the security requirements to be able to send an email through Google’s mail servers.

Only the newest Ricoh color MFP’s can support their SSL over SMTP requirement. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is an encryption method that has been rapidly adopted by most hosted email services as a way to ensure the security of their services in the mobile phone age. Its helps companies like Google prevent criminal spammers and malicious hackers from using their servers.

To set up your machine to use your Google servers for scan to email, enter these settings in your Ricoh MFP:

SMTP Server: smtp.gmail.com
Port: 465
SMTP Authentication: Set to <On>
SMTP Authentication Email Address: <Your full Google Apps email address>
Username: <Your full Google Apps email address>
Password: <Your Google Apps password>
Use SSL: On

If you are using the web interface to enter these settings, note that the SSL option is only available at the touchscreen of the machine itself under the SMTP Server setting.

If you have an older Ricoh that does not support SSL, Halsey has found a workaround to keep you scanning until your next upgrade. You can use asmpx.l.google.com as your SMTP server without authentication or encryption. The drawback is that you will only be able to scan to other gmail addresses.

Despite this newbie mistake, it’s pretty common knowledge among office environments that shaking the toner cartridge will help squeeze out a little more ink. Let’s face it, copier and printer toner can be expensive. So why not do everything you can to save your company from undue print costs?

As it turns out, there is a scenario where shaking the toner to extend its life can be a very costly mistake, and it boils down to which of the two types of toner cartridges your machine has.

The first type is the one you are likely most familiar with from your laser printers. Typically, a big black rectangular cartridge. This cartridge holds the toner as well as two other important components called the drum and the developer.

The second type is what is found in most large printers and MFPs. In these machines, it is more cost-effective to have the toner, drum, and developer as three separate components. The toner component will typically look like a translucent plastic tube allowing you to see the toner inside.

If you have the second type, and your toner container is separate from the developer, it can be risky to shake extra toner from a near-empty bottle. The reason is because the developer component has the ability to continue producing prints even after the toner bottle is completely empty. This ruins the developer, which is a very costly component.

With this type of toner container, it is important to replace the toner when the machine tells you to. Otherwise you could damage the machine.

With the all-in-one cartridge, however, you are replacing all three components everytime you replace your toner, so draining it dry is totally fine. Shake to your heart’s content! Unless, of course, you are wearing a really nice suit.

In a strange turn of events. We have been notified by Nuance that the DigiDocFlow outage will only affect the software on August 1, 2011. That is, those clients who we were unable to get updated today should be up and running as normal. We are discontinuing our proactive patching as of this morning. If you are still experiencing issues, please contact support@halsey-griffith.com

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Attention DigiDocFlow Customers,

Some versions of DigiDocFlow have ceased working as of July 31, 2011. We have a fix ready today and are setting up remote sessions for clients to get them back up and running.

The fix takes about 30 minutes per server.

If you are having trouble with DigiDocFlow, please email support@halsey-griffith.com. We will setup a remote session for you and give you an estimate of when we expect to start work on your system.

We appreciate your patience in this matter as we have many clients dependant on this software and are working as diligently as possible to get everyone back working as soon as possible.

Thank You for Your Cooperation,
Blake Siemon
Solutions Manager

Remote support provides quick response and resolution to IT issues that can drag down your office’s productivity. We offer it as an inexpensive measure to help keep our clients’ equipment operating in harmony with their ever- changing network environment.

At $75 per incident, you can leverage the power of our expertise and minimize the downtime of scanning and printing in your office. That’s help ‘right now’ at less than 50% of our on-site IT support rate.

As always, if we determine your scanning or printing outage was result of a failure of your Halsey equipment, you will not be charged and we will dispatch a technician to resolve your hardware issue under contract.

If you are having issues and think you may need remote support, call our service department at 1-800-875-7426.

The excess moisture in paper evaporates when being fused which causes your paper to curl. That curling paper is why we see a sharp rise in service calls related to paper jams in the summer months.

To help you keep your equipment running up to the standards you have come to expect as Halsey & Griffith customers, we thought we would share with you our tips to minimize moisture in your paper stocks.Always keep paper wrapped during storage. The cardboard box and the wrapper all help to absorb moisture so that it doesn’t get into your paper.

• If you open a ream of paper, be sure to use it all. If it doesn’t all fit where you need it, find a different machine for the remainder of the ream.
• Front your old paper. When refilling a paper tray that isn’t completely empty, be sure to put the oldest paper on top so that it is used first. If you don’t, after a while the paper at the bottom of the stack has been out of the ream long enough to cause jams when it finally queues up into the machine.
• Buy quality paper from a quality source. You can’t control how paper is stored before it reaches your doorstep, so you are better off dealing with someone you trust.
• These simple tips should keep your printers and copiers running smoothly throughout the season.