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These are some of my top tips for making managing printers that little bit easier. They’re not exclusive, of course.

Educate your users about all the different functions of a multi-function device – particularly scanning, ’storage print’, where you print to an ‘in-box’ which allows you to print out a large number of documents at once [...]

Printer management is tricky for a variety of reasons, and I’m not going to pretend I know all the answers. But what I thought I would do is discuss a few of the issues that make it so tricky, and provide a few tips and tricks that can make things easier.
That’s MY printer syndrome
People get [...]

So as promised, here are my top tricks for effective management of support, maintenance and subscriptions. They are in no particular order!
Storage
Support, maintenance and subscriptions are all types of contracts. You should scan them in for your own reference and as a back-up, and send the originals for storage by the legal department in their [...]

Are you going to be surprised when I tell you that Support, Maintenance and Subscription arrangements have a lifecycle too? I didn’t think so!
New Agreements
Most of these agreements are entered into as an adjunct to the purchase of a piece of hardware or software, although subscription licenses are the actual license, but paid [...]

I hope everyone had a good Christmas and New Year! Mine was… interesting… to say the least, as I was visiting my brother’s in-laws in the South of Italy. Highlights of the stay included helping with the slaughtering of two pigs and processing the meat for salami and hams! Very cultural to say the least, [...]

The concept of a roadmap in IT is pretty simple – it is a graph or diagramme showing changes in technology over time. Nearly all technology stakeholders, including suppliers, IT departments and service providers and the business (by which I mean the bits of the organisation that actually earn the money!), will find them useful [...]

Here are my suggestions for how long lifecycle policies should be set for each of the major types of equipment, along with a brief explanation of factors to consider:
Servers – 5 to 7 years
The lifespan of a server will very much depend upon its original quality as well as to the use it is being [...]

In the last post we discussed some of the issues surrounding deciding how long we should keep equipment. In this post we’ll look at how to make those decisions and what factors we should take into account in deciding when and how to upgrade.
In general, it is best  to decide on a lifespan that we [...]

IT equipment in particular, tends to have quite a short useful life, ranging from perhaps 18 months for a blackberry to 10 years for a printer. Laptops, desktops, monitors and servers will all fall somewhere in between.
I say useful life because IT equipment can sometimes last much longer than this, however generally organisations will decide [...]

We’ve spent a couple of posts discussion the areas of Service Management that can take advantage of discovery tools and software asset management. This post will now look at how service management can take advantage of hardware asset management processes. I’ll keep it brief, as between you, me and the computer screen, it’s not the [...]