Equitrac boosts control of paper mountain

Despite regular predictions of the death of the paper office and the birth of the electronic office, paper continues to rule the roost in most organizations. Because of this fact, officials at Equitrac Corp. hope their newest product becomes a popular item.

Equitrac Office 3.0 gives information technology administrators close control throughout an enterprise over who can print, copy, fax and scan documents as well as the ability to tie that into regular analyses of what those activities are costing the organization.

Administrators can write rules that route documents to the most appropriate device based on such things as document size or printing costs per page, or can hold them for a secure release. They can also set authentication and security requirements to limit who can use certain devices, such as walk-up copiers.

Equitrac 3.0, using a document accounting server and printer port monitor, gathers information from printers or other devices in the organization and aggregates the data to deliver a report of the output from each device.

Using that information, various scenarios can be modeled to predict what the utilization and cost of various device configurations and output management strategies would be.

"If you want to get a sophisticated return-on-investment analysis, that can require some expertise to know what cost points to plug in," said Chris Wyszkowski, Equitrac's vice president of product marketing. "But it can produce meaningful results even at a simple level."

The product is available to agency buyers through General Services Administration schedules held by Equitrac distribution partners, such as Canon Inc. and Ricoh Company Ltd, and other major printer makers.