HP Toner Cartridges - Original or Remanufactured?

I read an article a few days ago from HP discussing ‘myths’ that exist about compatible cartridges. The myths they refer to relate to claims that remanufactured cartridges are as good as real HP cartridges. The main theme was that official HP ink and toner is simply better, despite what the manufacturers of compatible cartridges may claim, and therefore if you have a HP printer you should really only buy official HP ink.However the research behind this article is perhaps unsurprisingly commissioned by HP. So are HP guilty of misleading us too, or is there some real truth to the message of this article?

Many many years ago it used to be the case that if you owned an Epson, Canon or HP Printer then you had to get ink for that printer from the same manufacturer; ink was therefore very expensive.

Recently however we’ve had a bit more choice; you could take your cartridges to be re-filled or you could buy a kit complete with syringes to do it yourself at home, which was often messy. More recently a better solution has been available; Compatible (sometimes referred to as Remanufactured) Cartridges which are brand new sealed units ready to drop straight into your printer. Cheaper, just as easy to use and with claims of the same print quality, page yield and safety as original cartridges.

Therefore for small & medium businesses on a budget, buying remanufactured toner cartridges can be an easy way of saving on printing costs. But is it real value for money or money down the drain?

Are remanufactured cartridges as reliable as HP original cartridges?
HP states not, but data from one of our long-standing suppliers suggests a failure rate of less than 10% on remanufactured cartridges. From my experience (over 20 years in the industry!) the failure rate of both original HP and the current quality of compatible ink is about the same; very few and far between.

Is the page yield the same for original and remanufactured cartridges?
All HP original cartridges are constructed to strict ISO standards for measuring page yields which enables a more accurate estimate of the number of pages you can expect to get from your cartridge. HP may have a point here; page yield claims for remanufactured toners sometimes are based on a lower quality print than official HP toner giving an artificially high reading. But in most cases now the same standards are used for remanufactured toners as for original toners. There are also longer-life versions of remanufactured cartridges available (i.e. C7115XX, Q1338XX) which, for an additional £5-£10 offer double the toner capacity and are still far cheaper than the standard yield original toner.

Is the print quality the same for original and remanufactured cartridges?
In tests, original HP toner cartridges delivered pages that were acceptable for all uses an average of 97% of the time. Certainly with original HP cartridges you may find the print sharper and cleaner, especially when printing in colour but is this always necessary? i.e. is the printing job just for in-house use? If so then is it worth paying the extra £50+? Also, bear in mind the type and standard of paper used can make a significant difference to the print quality.

Will using a remanufactured toner affect my HP printer warranty?
The use of remanufactured cartridges will not affect your printer’s warranty, unless it can be proved it was the toner that caused direct damage. All remanufactured toners, as well as original toners, are fully guaranteed and if found to be faulty can be returned and replaced within days at no extra cost to the end-user.

Price Comparisons – see how much you can save by using Remanufactured cartridges!

HP L/jet 4250 Hi-Capacity Toner – Q5942X (prints 20,000 pages) – Original @ £165.00 / Compatible @ £49.95
HP L/jet P2015 Hi-Capacity Toner – Q7553X (prints 7000 pages) – Original @ £108.00 / Compatible @ £38.50
HP L/jet P4015 Hi-Capacity Toner – CC364X (prints 24,000 pages) – Original @ £199.00 / Compatible @ £54.95
HP Color L/jet 5500 Black Toner – C9730A (prints 13,000 pages) – Original @ £159.00 / Compatible @ £64.95
HP Color L/jet 5500 Colour Toners – C9731A/2A/3A (print 12.000 pages) – Original @ £220.00 / Compatible @ £64.95

Prices are valid at the time of issue. All prices exclude VAT and delivery.

Conclusion
In conclusion, it would be careless not to consider the huge savings using remanufactured cartridges can give your business. The quality of compatible toners has improved tenfold over recent years as manufacturers have vied for business in an ever-increasing market place. The main point to bear in mind when making your choice would be what you are actually printing – if you are printing colour brochures and flyers for example, I recommend original HP toners as these will probably give you a much sharper, clearer print. However for everyday in-house use, I would say remanufactured cartridges will be more than adequate.

Jill Anderson
Consumables Specialist
Zantra JAD

01752 786 000
jill.anderson@zantragroup.co.uk
http://www.zantragroup.co.uk/


(Original HP article at: http://h30458.www3.hp.com/ww/en/smb/1088203.html?jumpid=em_taw_GB_jul11_ipg-ips_1325654_hpgl_gb_1097950_0&DIMID=1040017714&DICID=null&mrm=1-4BVUP)

What is Microsoft SharePoint and how can it benefit your business?

What is Microsoft SharePoint and how can it benefit your business?

I’ve seen Microsoft SharePoint in action and it can be an amazing thing and life-changing application for a business, but I’ve seen both successful and pointless implementations alike. There are hundreds of articles and blogs around offering an opinion on why a SharePoint project might fail, often singling out a moment in the planning, design or requirements gathering process else pointing the finger at the management or the end-users for not ‘getting it’.

There may be some truth to this in some cases; however in theory if from the very start everyone in a business has a clear understanding of what SharePoint is, how it will make ‘something’ in their business better or easier and you have a good partner on-hand to help with the implementation then it should be an outstanding success which overnight can save you both time and money and make your business more competitive.

All of which sounds lovely, but I’ve looked around to see if I could find any information to give a clear understanding of what SharePoint is. After all an understanding of exactly this is the very first thing that needs to be achieved otherwise your implementation is probably doomed to be useless; an empty shell of an application sat taking up space in a corner of your network.

If you try to look for a ‘definition’ of what SharePoint is then Microsoft will repeatedly throw words at you like collaboration, efficiency, intelligence and sharing. Elsewhere such as Wikipedia you’ll find a farm of links to other articles you’ll need to read in order to understand it such as cloud, web application, content and document management etc.

SharePoint isn’t new, far from it. The first version of SharePoint was released in 2001, around the same time as Office XP and whilst subsequent versions have improved functionality and are more stable etc, the fact remains that SharePoint has now been with us for a decade. But do you actually know what SharePoint is and what it does?

So what is SharePoint?

To explain what SharePoint is as best as possible, I’ll need you to imagine all of your Microsoft Office Applications (Word, Excel, Outlook etc) and other tools such as your web browser and then imagine your business has no computers, no IT what-so-ever and think what you’d need to replace those applications which you use every day:

To start let’s think about Microsoft Word. In order to replace Word in your business you’d need a few things; paper and pens, a dictionary and a thesaurus but the key thing you’d most likely need is a scribe. Someone to pen your letters, open your documents etc.

Then Outlook would be your courier; sending important documents to your clients and bringing you information back to your door with your name on the envelope. You may even need a boy who works in the mail room, sorting the letters and delivering them to the right person in the business and filtering out all of the junk letters nobody wants. If like me, you rely on Outlook to manage all of your meetings, you’d most certainly need a diary, if not a secretary or personal assistant.

As a separate point, couriers do not store things for you (not for more than a few weeks anyway) and outlook is exactly the same! If you have thousands of e-mails dating back years and years, taking up more than a gigabyte in your inbox (even if you have them stored away in outlook folders somewhere) then please give us a call and let us help you before you lose everything.

Excel again would be a few different things; a pencil and a rubber, your abacus / calculator depending on how thoroughly you are removing technology from your imagination. It would be your accountant and the person who you employ to draw all of you bar graphs and pie charts to help you make sense of your data.

Your Web Browser such as Internet Explorer or FireFox would be where you find your information. So let’s imagine it would be newspapers, magazines, the yellow pages, press-releases, books and encyclopaedias etc. In some cases it would even be you having to travel to events and exhibitions to keep up-to-date. 

Windows Explorer in simple terms would be your filing cabinet. How you store and find the information and documents you need.

Google and Yahoo and other Search Engines; these are actually pretty difficult to quantify when I think about it. What did we used to do / what would we do without them? Let’s skip those.

But you get the idea by now, so where does SharePoint fit in to this technology free world? In the simplest terms possible SharePoint would be your office; the actual building you work in. It would be the place all of your employees come to do their work, to meet each other and share their knowledge, to agree who is responsible for what and the one place that everyone who works for the company knows that they can go to find the information they need.

So back to the real world, SharePoint is no different really to any other ‘application’ mentioned above, but what it does is very different. No doubt as we were going through you started to wonder what you would do without the internet, without your Microsoft Office but the reality is that we got along just fine before all of that. Yes things are arguably better now, we’re more productive and we have access to more information faster than we ever thought possible – we also have more distractions and threats to our data but that’s for another blog.

If your business isn’t using SharePoint then it’s quite likely that you are in theory at that same place we all were before the Internet and Microsoft Office were part of our businesses; you are making do just fine but once you have it, you’ll wonder how you got along without it. If you implement it before your competitor then would your business soon have the advantage that Amazon has over other competitors?   

So what does SharePoint do and will it make your business better?

First of all, SharePoint comes in a few different versions; there is a free version which is pretty good and there is a premium version with better Integration into non-Microsoft applications and more features. You can either have SharePoint locally on your own server, we could host SharePoint for you on our servers or your businesses SharePoint could be held in the Cloud by Microsoft or someone else. So all in all it’s flexible, scalable and quite accessible too. 

As for what SharePoint can do and how it can make your business better; you could choose to implement just one or any number of the below features:

Document Management – Which first and foremost is about storage of documents. Any type of document; pictures, videos, spreadsheets, scanned documents etc. Then storing them in an intelligent and easily searchable way, having one single place where employees can find the correct copy of every document within the business.

Beyond the obvious, it’s then about having multiple people working on the same document without replicating that document. It’s tracking the life and changes in a document and being able to see in a ‘work-flow’ how far away any particular document is from being complete. Having a single point of access for all information ensuring everyone is using the correct version of a document and cutting down the amount of data duplication.

Process Management – You’re business has processes; from something as simple as booking a holiday (the initial request going to the correct line manager for approval) right up to your own project management methodologies, disciplinary procedures and your ISO certifications. SharePoint can help you define your business processes and help you implement and enforce them, by integrating with other tools such as your Outlook calendar (not showing the holiday in an employee’s calendar until it is approved and allowing a central view of all resources available in any particular period) or with Word (not letting a document be published until it has the Legal Directors approval).

Intranets and Extranets – SharePoint can provide a password protected portal for your external partners and clients to log onto and access certain information and even to contribute to a particular document or process. It can also be used as a portal for all of your internal communication / knowledge / applications; a way to centralise everything in your business.

Blogs and Wikis – An excellent way of sharing knowledge either internally or externally. Let your employees contribute everything they know about your business, about best practice and about your competitors. Share with your customers the latest news and information which could be important to them. Have a central searchable space where employees can look for a single word or an entire sentence and instantly see everything everyone in your business knows about that topic.

Meetings – Keep track of agendas, minuets and all of those tasks which were assigned to everyone. Track the progress of each individual task and ultimately reduce the number of meetings you need to have, as the information you need to discuss at your meeting is available to you instantly.

Groups – Assign groups and restrict access to certain individuals based on the team / division they work in or the level of seniority within the business. A way to make sure people can only see and access the information which is relevant for them.

Contacts – Not quite a fully featured CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) but a very functional and useable way of storing all of your contact information and having it instantly available to everyone who needs it.  Or fully integrate SharePoint with your CRM.

Social Discussion Forums, Boards and Surveys – allow you employees a space to socialise, develop relationships and plan team activities. Allow them to have a say on business issues and respond to surveys to grant insight into the thoughts and ideas of your most valuable business asset.

Compliancy and Auditing – Meet strict legal, government and industry compliancy standards.

Centralised Administration – Because everything is in one place, a quick change to a policy or process or user account is exactly that. Instantly update the way your business operates and see the changes occur immediately.

Business Intelligence and Dashboards – Establish a dashboard to give you an instant view of business performance, risk and compliance based on real-time data. Make better strategic decisions.

The First Step

Sticking with the office building analogy, you’d approach moving in to a new building in a structured way. You’d take steps; making sure that the electrical and plumbing work is complete first. Then you’d decorate before you get your furniture, fixtures and fittings installed. Well no surprises, it’s the same with SharePoint.

Keep things simple; SharePoint is not about having some flashy internet portal which looks great but does very little. But if you try to implement too much at once that's what you'll get. I’d recommend picking something, just one thing in your business which causes a problem or which you know could be much better than it is now and implement just that one thing in SharePoint. It could be something as simple as a shared calendar or it could be taking a business process and managing it through SharePoint.

Once you’ve made that first step, adding incremental features and more business processes or starting an internal wiki site becomes very easy; typically set up in just a few clicks.

Conclusion

There is far more than SharePoint does, but hopefully you are able to see the value of one or more of these functions being implemented and improving the way your business works.

I feel quite strongly that SharePoint can benefit most businesses in Plymouth and across Devon and Cornwall. Uptake in our little corner of the world has been quite slow, so there is a unique opportunity now to get on-board with a well established, reliable and proven technology to become a better and more intelligent business than your competition.

 Clearly if you are a sole trader then collaboration and knowing where the right information is at any given time is perhaps less of a concern; there would be some advantages to having the document management capabilities and flexibility around easy access to information from anywhere (with the cloud versions). But certainly any business with between 5 and 500 employees must face these challenges, perhaps without even realising it and SharePoint could be the answer.

If implemented correctly, SharePoint can revolutionise and streamline the way you do business and improve the service which you provide. But it has to be implemented correctly; going back to the start of this blog everyone in the business needs to know what it is, why it’s being introduced, what the planned benefit is and to have the ability to contribute to defining how SharePoint will achieve its objectives and practically how it will work.

The final and perhaps the most important piece is having the right implementation partner by your side; someone who doesn’t just understand how to install and configure SharePoint but someone who truly understands your business, your people and just how important meeting these objectives is to the success of your organisation.

So in conclusion, SharePoint is just a tool not dissimilar to any other business application. It’s probably underrated and underutilised in the South West but once you know what it is and can see what it could do for you, implementing SharePoint could be the best decision you make this decade.


David Hayward
Zantra JAD
Sales Manager

01752 786 000
david.hayward@zantragroup.co.uk
http://www.zantragroup.co.uk/