In a recent briefing for analysts, HP announced updates to its document solutions range to provide a complete and differentiated portfolio, meeting current and increasing market trends, and expand the products available for SMB markets. The HP solutions portfolio has grown over time and now covers areas of mobility, security, workflow and fleet management.
The HP Imaging & Printing Security Center is a stand-out solution in the field of security solutions, with unique functionality that earned an Outstanding Achievement award in the BLI Winter 2013 Pick awards. Marc Jongen, EMEA Product Manager for software solutions at HP, described it as “the industry’s first policy-based security fleet management solution”. Designed to centralize and automate the process of bringing—and keeping—devices in compliance with an organization’s preferred security policies, the solution ensures 100% device security compliance and automatically picks up new devices added to the network and applies the security policy to them. With 141 security settings, the administration could be far more complex but by using a security policy HP have minimized administration time and IT knowledge required as all settings can be easily applied in a single policy, making it ideal for SMB that do not have dedicated IT staff.
A new offering to the HP SMB portfolio is HP Flow CM Professional. This proven enterprise content management solution is now available to small- and mid-size firms as a cloud solution. By using a public cloud for storage, HP aim to save SMB customers initial investment. Instead, customers pay a subscription and access the solution through a web browser, mobile app or directly at the MFP control panel. No IT management is required as all the complexity of the back-end is hidden.
With basic workflows available as standard, SMB customers can take advantage of HP Flow CM Professional to digitize paper documents, store and print documents, and collaborate and share files easily. Jongen calls the system “intuitive” so very little training should be required making it ideal for smaller customers. The utility also allows users to check in and out files for editing and offers approval functionality, with the ability to add alerts and notifications, for docs such as invoices. Furthermore, the solution integrates with both HP and third-party MFPs, so no hardware investment is required.
Jongen also explained that HP has created a Channel Solutions Framework to ensure Imaging & Printing Channel Partners are fully equipped to support SMB customers. The end-to-end framework sets out sales and technical training for channel partners to become certified Document Solutions Specialists, provides sales tools and technical advice, and also operates a rewards scheme. HP anticipates that, with this framework in place, channel partners will be comprehensively trained and able to offer SMB customers additional support.
For more information on HP’s document solutions portfolio for SMB visit: www.hp.com/software