The Future of Documents: Social Networking for Printers?
The copier had a reputation of being a “social” device, where people meet, exchange and discuss; this is becoming even more true! Did you know all the Social Networking and Collaborative Filtering principles of YouTube, LinkedIn, or Amazon have been applied to your good old infrastructure for a while?
Indeed, the Xerox Office Services Suite includes a technology called Print Infrastructure Mining, which mines print usage patterns to derive useful ”social” information for users and printers.
The advantage there is, you don’t even have to indicate your preferred devices - the Print Infrastructure Mining system automatically collects that information by observing your behaviour, in other words by mining the information from your job logs on where you print, and potentially what kind of document formats.
Based on that information, it is capable of building a 2-D “Social Map” of your device infrastructure. This map automatically discovers the physical layout of your infrastructure and groups devices by building and gives an intuitive, real time status of your infrastructure.
But it also provides much richer information, such as the “affinities” between those printers, and will help users choose the best backup printer to redirect a print job to if the first choice fails.
Or, it will help the administrator identify the best way to rationalize and right-size your infrastructure, to make it most efficient, less costly, and be more environmentally friendly by using less power.
Click here for a podcast interview with Victor Ciriza, the inventor of that cool technology, that describes how that technology came to life.
Francois Ragnet
Managing Principal, Technology Innovation
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