Internet Marketing for SMEs: E-marketing strategies, tools and techniques for SMEs

Internet Marketing for SMEs: E-marketing strategies, tools and techniques for SMEs

Carbon paper

Carbon paper is paper coated on one side with a layer of a loosely bound dry ink or pigmented coating, usually bound with wax. It is used for making one or more copies simultaneous with the creation of an original document. Manufacture of carbon paper was formerly the largest consumer of montan wax.

Carbon paper is placed between the original and a blank sheet to be copied onto. As the user writes or types on the original, the pressure from the pen or typeface deposits the ink on the blank sheet, thus creating a "carbon-copy" of the original document.

As the ink is transferred from the carbon paper to the underlying paper, an impression of the corresponding text is left on the "carbon" where the ink was removed. Carbon paper used to create sensitive documents can be subjected to forensic analysis and is thus a concern for information security, so it must be shredded or otherwise destroyed to maintain security.

Carbon paper has been mostly superseded by electronic means such as photocopying, though it is still, although rarely, used to make copies of typewriting. Also, a carbonless copy paper is still used in situations where instant copies of written documents are needed. Examples of this are receipts at point of sale (though they have mostly been relegated to being backups for when electronic POS devices fail) or for on-the-spot fine notices, duplicate checks, and some money orders (though the United States Postal Service has recently converted to an electronic format), and tracking slips for various expedited mail services requiring multiple copies.

Inkjet printers

Office supplies inkjet printers operate by propelling various size (mostly tiny) droplets of liquid or molten material (ink) onto almost any media. They are the most common type of computer printer for the general consumer due to their low cost, high quality of output, capability of printing in vivid color, and ease of use.

Like most modern office technologies, the present-day inkjet has built on the progress made by many earlier versions. Among many contributors, Epson, Hewlett-Packard and Canon can claim a substantial share of credit for the development of the modern inkjet. In the worldwide consumer market, four manufacturers account for the majority of inkjet printer sales: Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Epson, and Lexmark.
The emerging Ink jet material deposition market also uses ink jet technologies, typically piezoelectric ink jets, to deposit materials directly on substrates.

Technologies
There are three main technologies in use in contemporary inkjet printers: thermal, piezoelectric, and continuous.

Thermal inkjets
Most cheap consumer and office inkjet printers (Lexmark, Hewlett-Packard, Canon) work by having a print cartridge with a series of tiny electrically heated chambers constructed by photolithography. To produce an image, the printer runs a pulse of current through the heating elements causing a steam explosion in the chamber to form a bubble, which propels a droplet of ink onto the paper (hence Canon's tradename of Bubblejet for its inkjets). The ink's surface tension as well as the condensation and thus contraction of the vapour bubble, pulls a further charge of ink into the chamber through a narrow channel attached to an ink reservoir.
The ink used is known as aqueous (i.e. water-based inks using pigments or dyes) and the print head is generally cheaper to produce than other inkjet technologies. The principle was discovered by Canon engineer Ichiro Endo in August 1977.
Note that thermal inkjets have no relation to thermal printers, which produce images by heating thermal paper, as seen on older fax machines, cash register, ATM receipt, and lottery ticket printers.

Piezoelectric inkjets
Most commercial and industrial office ink jet printers use a piezoelectric material in an ink-filled chamber behind each nozzle instead of a heating element. When a voltage is applied, the piezoelectric material changes shape or size, which generates a pressure pulse in the fluid forcing a droplet of ink from the nozzle. This is essentially the same mechanism as the thermal inkjet but generates the pressure pulse using a different physical principle. Piezoelectric ink jet allows a wider variety of inks than thermal or continuous ink jet but the print heads are more expensive.

Continuous ink jet
The continuous ink jet method is used commercially for marking and coding of products and packages. The idea was first patented in 1867, by Lord Kelvin and the first commercial devices (medical strip chart recorders) were introduced in 1951 by Siemens.

In continuous ink jet technology, a high-pressure pump directs liquid ink from a reservoir through a gunbody and a microscopic nozzle, creating a continuous stream of ink droplets. A piezoelectric crystal creates an acoustic wave as it vibrates within the gunbody and causes the stream of liquid to break into droplets at regular intervals – 64,000 to 165,000 drops per second may be achieved.

The ink droplets are subjected to an electrostatic field created by a charging electrode as they form, the field varied according to the degree of drop deflection desired. This results in a controlled, variable electrostatic charge on each droplet. Charged droplets are separated by one or more uncharged “guard droplets” to minimize electrostatic repulsion between neighboring droplets.

The charged droplets pass through an electrostatic field and are directed (deflected) by electrostatic deflection plates to print on the receptor material (substrate), or allowed to continue on undeflected to a collection gutter for re-use. The more highly charged droplets are deflected to a greater degree. Only a few percent of the droplets are actually used to print, the majority being recycled.

Continuous ink jet is one of the oldest ink jet technologies in use and is fairly mature. One of its advantages is the very high velocity (~50 m/s) of the ink droplets, which allows for a relatively long distance between print head and substrate. Another advantage is freedom from nozzle clogging as the jet is always in use, therefore allowing volatile solvents such as ketones and alcohols to be employed, giving the ink the ability to "bite" into the substrate and dry quickly.

The ink system requires active solvent regulation in order to accommodate for solvent evaporation during the time of flight (time between nozzle ejection and gutter recycling) and from the venting process whereby air that is drawn into the gutter along with the unused drops is vented from the reservoir. Viscosity is monitored and a solvent (or solvent blend) is added in order to counteract the described solvent loss.

Inkjet inks
The basic problem with inkjet inks are the conflicting requirements for a colouring agent that will stay on the surface and rapid dispersement of the carrier fluid.

Desktop inkjet printers, as used in offices or at home, all use aqueous inks based on a mixture of water, glycol and dyes or pigments. These inks are inexpensive to manufacture, but are difficult to control on the surface of media, often requiring specially coated media. Aqueous inks are mainly used in printers with disposable, so-called thermal inkjet heads, as these heads require water in order to perform.
Some professional office wide format printers use aqueous inks, but the majority in professional use today employ a much wider range of inks, most of which require piezo inkjet heads:

• Solvent inks: the main ingredient of these inks are VOCs. The chief advantage of solvent inks is that they are comparatively inexpensive and enable printing on uncoated vinyl substrates, which are used to produce vehicle graphics, billboards and banners. Disadvantages include the vapour produced by the solvent and the need to dispose of used solvent.
• UV-curable inks: these inks consist mainly of acrylic monomers with an initiator package. After printing, the ink is cured by exposure to strong UV-light. The advantage of UV-curable inks is that they "dry" as soon as they are cured, they can be applied to a wide range of uncoated substrates, and they produce a very robust image. Disadvantages are that they are expensive, require expensive curing modules in the printer, and the cured ink has a significant volume and so gives a slight relief on the surface.
• Dye sublimation inks: these inks contain special sublimation dyes and are used to print directly or indirectly on to fabrics which consist of a high percentage of polyester fibres. A heating step causes the dyes to sublimate into the fibers and create an image with strong color and good durability.

Inkjet head design There are main design philosophies in inkjet head design: fixed-head and disposable head. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Fixed head The fixed-head philosophy provides an inbuilt print head (often referred to as a Gaither Head) that is designed to last for the whole life of the printer. The idea is that because the head need not be replaced every time the ink runs out, consumable costs can be made lower and the head itself can be more precise than a cheap disposable one, typically requiring no calibration. On the other hand, if the head is damaged, it is usually necessary to replace the entire printer. Epson have traditionally used fixed print heads featuring micropiezo technology. These print heads are available in consumer products and are typically more accurate in dot placement than comparable thermal printers.
Other fixed head designs are more likely to be found on industrial high-end printers and large format plotters and use piezo inkjet heads. Because development of these heads requires a large investment in research and development, there are only a few companies offering them: Kodak VersamarkTrident, Xaar, Spectra (Dimatix), Hitachi / Ricoh, HP Scitex, Brother, Konica Minolta, Seiko Epson, and ToshibaTec (a licensee of Xaar).
Hewlett-Packard has introduced a fixed-head thermal inkjet printer with its newer printer models such as the HP Photosmart 3310.
The Memjet technology, developed by Silverbrook Research, is a thermal inkjet technology that is integrated into fixed, page-wide fixed heads. The printheads are designed to scale from 20 mm to up to 2 m. The first OEM printers using the Memjet technology are expected to be available in 2008 or 2009 in 100 mm and A4/letter formats.

Disposable head The disposable head philosophy uses a print head which is supplied as a part of a replaceable ink cartridge. Every time a cartridge is exhausted, the entire cartridge and print head are replaced with a new one. This adds to the cost of consumables and makes it more difficult to manufacture a high-precision head at a reasonable cost, but also means that a damaged print head is only a minor problem: the user can simply buy a new cartridge. Hewlett-Packard has traditionally favoured the disposable print head, as did Canon in its early models.
An intermediate method does exist: a disposable ink tank connected to a disposable head, which is replaced infrequently (perhaps every tenth ink tank or so). Most high-volume Hewlett-Packard inkjet printers use this setup, with the disposable print heads used on lower volume models.
Canon now uses (in most models) replaceable print heads which are designed to last the life of the printer, but can be replaced by the user if they should become clogged. For models with "Think Tank" technology, the ink tanks are separate for each ink color.
Cleaning mechanisms
The primary cause of inkjet printing problems is due to ink drying on the printhead's nozzles, causing the pigments and dyes to dry out and form a solid block of hardened mass that plugs the microscopic ink passageways. Most printers attempt to prevent this drying from occurring by covering the printhead nozzles with a rubber cap when the printer is not in use. Abrupt power losses, or unplugging the printer before it has capped the printhead, can cause the printhead to be left in an uncapped state. Further even when capped this seal is not perfect, and over a period of several weeks the moisture can still seep out, causing the ink to dry and harden. Once ink begins to collect and harden drop volume can be affected, drop trajectory can change, or the nozzle can fail to jet ink completely.

To combat this drying, nearly all inkjet printers include a mechanism to reapply moisture to the printhead. Typically there is no separate supply of pure ink-free solvent available to do this job, and so instead the ink itself is used to remoisten the printhead. The printer attempts to fire all nozzles at once, and as the ink sprays out, some of it will wick across the printhead to the dry channels and partially softens the hardened ink. After spraying, a rubber wiper blade is swept across the printhead to spread the moisture evenly across the printhead, and the jets are again all fired to dislodge any ink clumps blocking the channels.
Most office and home Epson printers also use a supplemental air-suction pump, utilizing the rubber capping station to suck ink through a severely clogged cartridge. The suction pump mechanism is driven by the page feed stepper motor – it is connected to the end of the shaft. The pump only engages when the shaft turns backwards, hence the rollers reversing while head cleaning. Due to the built-in head design, the suction pump is also needed to prime the ink channels inside a new Epson printer, and to reprime the channels between ink tank changes.
The ink consumed in the cleaning process needs to be collected somewhere to prevent ink from leaking all over the surface under the printer. The collection area is known as the spittoon, and in Hewlett Packard printers this is an open plastic tray underneath the cartridge storage and cleaning/wiping station. In Epson printers, there is typically a large fibrous absorption pad in a pan underneath the paper feed platen. For printers several years old, it is common for the dried ink in the spittoon to form a pile that can stack up and touch the printheads, jamming the printer with sticky slime. Some larger professional printers using solvent inks may employ a replaceable plastic receptacle to contain waste ink and solvent which needs to be emptied and/or replaced when full.

The type of ink used in the office and home printer can also affect how quickly the printhead nozzles become clogged. While the official brand of ink is highly engineered to match the printer mechanism, generic inks cannot exactly match the composition of the official brand since the actual ink composition is a trade secret. Generic ink brands may alternately be too volatile to keep the printhead moist during storage, or may be too thick and jellied leading to frequent printhead channel clogging.
There is a second type of ink drying that most printers are unable to prevent. In order for ink to spray out of the cartridge, air needs to enter somewhere to displace the removed ink. The air enters via an extremely long, thin labyrinth tube, up to 10 cm long, wrapping back and forth across the ink tank. The channel is long and narrow to slow down moisture from evaporating out through the vent tube, but some evaporation still occurs and eventually the ink cartridge dries up from the inside out.
The frequent cleaning conducted by printers can consume quite a bit of ink and has a great impact on cost per page determinations.
Clogged nozzles can be detected by printing a pattern on the page. Methods are known for re-routing printing information from a clogged nozzle to a working nozzle.
Inkjet advantagesCompared to earlier consumer-oriented colour printers, inkjets have a number of advantages. They are quieter in operation than impact dot matrix or daisywheel printers. They can print finer, smoother details through higher printhead resolution, and many consumer inkjets with photographic-quality printing are widely available.
In comparison to more expensive technologies like thermal wax, dye sublimations, and laser printers, inkjets have the advantage of practically no warm up time and lower cost per page (except when compared to laser printers).
For some inkjet printers, monochrome ink sets are available either from the printer manufacturer or third-party suppliers. These allow the inkjet printer to compete with the silver-based photographic papers traditionally used in black-and-white photography, and provide the same range of tones – neutral, "warm" or "cold". When switching between full-color and monochrome ink sets, it is necessary to flush out the old ink from the print head with a special cleaning cartridge.
As opposed to most other types of printers, inkjet printer cartridges can be refilled. Most printer cartridges can be easily refilled by drilling a hole in and filling the tank portion of the cartridge. This method is more cost effective as opposed to buying a new cartridge each time one runs dry.
Inkjet disadvantagesInkjet printers may have a number of disadvantages:

1. The ink is often very expensive (for a typical OEM cartridge priced at $15, containing 5 ml of ink, the ink effectively costs $3000 per liter)
2. Many "intelligent" ink cartridges contain a microchip that communicates the estimated ink level to the printer; this may cause the printer to display an error message, or incorrectly inform the user that the ink cartridge is empty. In some cases, these messages can be ignored, but many inkjet printers will refuse to print with a cartridge that declares itself empty, in order to prevent consumers from refilling cartridges.
3. The lifetime of inkjet prints produced by inkjets using aqueous inks is limited; they will eventually fade and the color balance may change. On the other hand, prints produced from solvent-based inkjets may last several years before fading, even in direct sunlight, and so-called "archival inks" have been produced for use in aqueous-based machines which offer extended life.
4. Because the ink used in most consumer inkjets is water-soluble, care must be taken with inkjet-printed documents to avoid even the smallest drop of water, which can cause severe "blurring" or "running." Similarly, water-based highlighter markers can blur inkjet-printed documents.

These disadvantages have been addressed in a variety of ways:

1. Third-party ink suppliers sell ink cartridges at significantly reduced costs (often 10%−30% of OEM cartridge prices) and also sell kits to refill cartridges, and bulk ink, at even lower prices.
2. Many vendors' "intelligent" ink cartridges have been reverse-engineered. It is now possible to buy inexpensive devices to reliably reset such cartridges to report themselves as full, so that they may be refilled many times.
3. Print lifetime is highly dependent on the quality and formulation of the ink, as well as the paper chosen. The earliest inkjet printers, intended for home and small office applications, used dye-based inks. Even the best dye-based inks are not as durable as pigment-based inks, which are now available for many inkjet printers.

Third-party ink and cartridges The high cost of OEM ink cartridges, and the intentional obstacles to refilling them have been addressed by third-party ink suppliers.
Many printer manufacturers discourage customers from using third-party inks, claiming that they may damage the print heads, leak, and produce inferior-quality output. However, some OEM cartridges can be refilled, and the "intelligent" cartridge microchips may be circumvented as explained above. Some cartridges lose ink capacity upon refilling due to air growth in the internal foam. When an Epson inkjet printer 'thinks' a cartridge is empty and this is not so, it can sometimes be 'fooled' by sticking a strip of clear thin adhesive tape/film over the outlets of the cartridge which is then pierced when the cartridge is replaced in the printer. This might work for other printers.
The quality of third-party ink and cartridges is widely debated. Consumer Reports has noted that third-party cartridges may contain less ink than OEM cartridges, and thus yield no cost savings. Wilhelm Imaging Research[3] claims that with third-party inks the lifetime of prints may be considerably reduced. However, an April 2007 review[4] showed that, in a double-blind test, reviewers generally preferred the output produced using third-party ink over OEM ink. They plan next to compare the longevity of prints using OEM and third-party ink. OEM inks generally have undergone significant system reliability testing with the cartridge and print-head materials, whereas R&D efforts on 3rd party inks material compatibility is likely to be significantly less.
The third party refill industry is a relatively new business having been around for only six years. As the industry matured into three or four major refillers, a sub industry has emerged to service the refill industry. Higher volumes justified the cost of developing new inks and more effective refill and cleaning equipment to match the new processes that the major chains of refillers have developed. As a result, the process has moved from a simple topping up with a syringe to flushing old ink out and replacing it with cartridge specific new ink using modern vacuum filling equipment. This has significantly improved the refill process.
Continuous ink system Many of the disadvantages of inkjet printers are addressed by third-party continuous ink systems (not to be confused with continuous ink jet printers, described above). These conversion kits connect the ink cartridges to reservoirs outside the printer: they can therefore hold much more ink, and may be replaced or filled individually. Continuous ink systems typically hold pigment inks, and some have been produced for printers that were only designed to use dye-based inks. The suppliers often provide color profiles for their ink systems when used with specific papers.
Overall expense Even with many available options for cost-reduction, inkjet printing remains expensive. Unless photo-realistic reproduction is necessary, value-minded consumers often prefer laser printers for medium- to high-volume printing applications.
Underlying business modelA common business model for inkjet printers involves selling the actual printer at or below production cost, while dramatically marking up the price of the (proprietary) ink cartridges. Some inkjet printers enforce this product tying using microchips in the cartridges to prevent the use of third-party or refilled ink cartridges. The microchips can function by storing an amount of ink remaining in the cartridge, which is updated as printing is conducted. Expiration dates for the ink may also be used. Even if the cartridge is refilled, the microchip will indicate to the printer that the cartridge is depleted. For some printers, special circuit flashers are available that reset the quantity of remaining ink to the maximum. Some manufacturers[attribution needed] have been accused of indicating that a cartridge is depleted while a substantial amount of ink remains in the cartridge.
Alternatives for consumers are cheaper copies of cartridges, produced by other companies, and refilling cartridges, for which refill kits are available. Owing to the large differences in pricing due to OEM markups, there are many companies specializing in these alternative ink cartridges. Most printer manufacturers discourage refilling disposable cartridges or using aftermarket copy cartridges. Refilling cartridges causes the manufacturers to lose revenue. Using non-qualified inks can cause poor image quality due to differences in viscosity, which can affect the amount of ink ejected in a drop, and color consistency. Refilling can also damage the printhead.
In Lexmark Int’l, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc., Case No. 03-5400 (6th Cir. Oct. 26, 2004) (Sutton, J.) the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that circumvention of this technique does not violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The European Commission ruled this practice anticompetitive: it will disappear in newer models sold in the European Union. While the DMCA case dealt with copyright protection, companies also rely on patent protection to prevent copying and refilling of cartridges. For example, if a company devises all of the ways in which their microchips can be manipulated and cartridges can be refilled and patents these methods, they can prevent anyone else from refilling their cartridges. Patents protecting the structure of their cartridges prevent the sale of cheaper copies of the cartridges.
Professional inkjet printer cartridges
Besides the well known small inkjet printers for home and office, there is a market for professional office inkjet printers; some being for page-width format printing, but most being for wide format printing. "Page-width format" means that the print width ranges from about 8.5" to 37" (about 20 cm to 100 cm). "Wide format" means that these are printers ranging in print width from 24" up to 15' (about 75 cm to 5 m). The application of the page-width printers is for printing high-volume business communications that have a lesser need for flashy layout and color. Particularly with the addition of variable data technologies, the page-width printers are important in billing, tagging, and individualized catalogs and newspapers. The application of most of the wide format printers is for printing advertising graphics; a minor application is printing of designs by architects or engineers.
Another specialty application for inkjets is producing prepress color proofs for printing jobs created in the digital realm. Such printers are designed to give accurate color rendition of how the final image will look (a "proof") when the job is finally produced on a large volume press such as a four offset lithography press. A well-known example of an inkjet designed for proof work is an Iris printer, and outputs from them are commonly "iris proofs" or just "irises".
In terms of units, the major supplier is Hewlett-Packard, which supply over 90 percent of the market for printers for printing technical drawings. The major products in their Designjet series are the Designjet 500/800, the new T-series (T1100 & T610), the Designjet 1050 and the Designjet 4000/4500. They also have the HP Designjet 5500, a six-color printer that is used especially for printing graphics as well as the new Designjet Z6100 which sits at the top of the HP Designjet range and features an eight colour pigment ink system.
The constantly growing niche of page-format printing has been filled by Kodak, with the Kodak Versamark(tm) VJ1000, VT3000, and VX5000 printing systems. Scitex also made a short-lived entry into high-speed, variable-data, inkjet printing, but sold its profitable assets associated with the technology to Kodak in 2005.
A few other suppliers of low volume wide format printers are Epson, Kodak and Canon. Epson has a group of 3 Japanese companies around it that predominantly use Epson piezo printheads and inks: Mimaki, Roland and Mutoh.
More professional high-volume office and home inkjet printers are made by a range of companies. These printers can range in price from €25,000 to as high as €1.5 m. Carriage widths on these units can range from 54" to 192" (about 1.4 to 5 m) and ink technologies tend toward solvent, eco-solvent and UV-curing as opposed to water-based (aqueous) ink sets. Major applications where these printers are used are for outdoor settings for billboards, truck sides and truck curtains, building graphics and banners, while indoor displays include point-of-sales displays, backlit displays, exhibition graphics and museum graphics.
The major suppliers for professional wide- and grand-format printers include: LexJet, Inca, Durst, Océ, NUR, Lüscher, VUTEk, Zünd, Scitex Vision, Gandinnovations, Mutoh, Mimaki, Roland DGA, Seiko I Infotech, Leggett and Platt, Agfa, Raster Printers and MacDermid ColorSpan.

Office romance

An office romance, work romance, or corporate affair is a romance that occurs between two people who work together in the same office, work location, or business. It tends to breach nonfraternization policies and is a foreseeable business expense. The relationship between affair partners at work can be as wide as intern and president; company CEO and member of the board; supervisor and supervisee; company representative and client; boss and secretary, and so on. And it can be between peers or colleagues at the same level in the organization. It can concurrently or after the fact come to be interpreted as sexual harassment. Intra-office romance between an executive and an employee can presage sexual harassment claims, to which email records bear witness.

Office romances are generally believed to be unhelpful to the welfare and effectiveness of the business and to the network of relationships that comprise it. They contain the potential for abuse, alliance, and distraction. Thus they are discouraged and even prohibited in some company policy. Describing an office relationship as a romance can be cover for a form of workplace bullying.

The suspicion that an advantage is gained by 'sleeping with the boss' in a competitive environment ensures that these transactions occur by stealth. To have a powerful influence on the opportunities placed in one's path, one does not have to engage in sexual intercourse. A special relationship could be enough to gain leverage where business opportunities are in short supply. This fuzzy boundary can be nuanced by practiced players in order to provide deniability when required. Neither does one have to be directly involved in the affair for the knowledge of it to be useful currency — discretion in exchange for advantage.

Office affairs may involve a power differential in both heterosexual and same sex liaisons. If the affair ends badly it is almost always the least powerful who gives up their job and the more powerful who stays or gets promoted out of the area as a solution.[citation needed] Increasingly employers will insert office romance disclosure clauses in employment contracts. Where the affair or its non-disclosure is in breach of that contract, the clandestine edge is heightened. Perversely this can increase both the excitement of the affair and the later damage to collegiate relationships and the company's good name. A witch hunt can ensue.

Incidence
In its 2003 nationwide survey Vault found that 47 percent of workers have participated in an office romance and an additional 19 percent would be willing to do so if the opportunity arose. Vault's 2003 Office Romance Survey is based on responses from over 1,000 professionals at companies nationwide. In addition, 13 percent of respondents said their employer had a policy regarding office dating, 51 percent said their company has no policy, and 36 percent said they didn't know whether one existed. When asked to comment about romance in the workplace, respondents replied:

• "Office romance is bound to happen. If you have people sharing common interests (work) + extended time together (40 hrs) + physical attraction = a perfect match."
• "Nothing wrong with office romance and it is actually a good thing, because I look forward to going to work to see my crush. I think that the consulting industry has the highest rate of office romance because you're constantly out on the road, and it can get pretty lonely."
• "Where else can you really see what somebody is like on a day-to-day basis? Usually office behavior/personality carries over to the private life. If someone is courteous, understanding, outgoing, etc, they will be that way in a romantic relationship as well and you typically spend 8-12 hours at work and it is a very good way to get to know someone."
• "When you work 80 hours per week, it is sometimes hard to meet anyone. You spend all your time in the office."

Power dynamics
Few companies have a defined policy against office romance according to the 2006 Workplace Romance survey of 493 HR professionals and 408 employees by the Society for Human Resource Management. Only 9% of those surveyed prohibit dating among employees, and more than 70% of organizations have no formal written or verbal policies about office romance. Some writers argue that the cost of having a formal policy may outweigh the benefits, as inevitable fraternization will be driven underground. The most common and legally enforceable policy states that supervisors cannot date employees within their direct chain of command.

An office romance is usually a breach of either formal or informal fraternization policies. It has been studied as an operation of power dynamics in romantic incubator relationships. Working closely with or living near someone and forming a romantic relationships may incubate romance through the propinquity effect. It evolves from collegiate relationship to limerence quickly and covertly - sometimes this is described as 'having a crush.' Affairs begin one conversation at a time, often without either party admitting to themselves that they intend a deeper connection. 'It just happened' may be the subsequent claim. In fact, the time between a so-called innocent beginning and the first kiss is usually considerable, but the time between that kiss and sexual intercourse is usually short. People involved in this way can appear to themselves to have landed in trouble very quickly, when in fact there was a slow fuse burning long before ignition.

The process of disengaging an office affair requires careful and non-punitive examination at every level of the organization in order to understand affair dynamics at work. That will assist in preventing breaches of employment contracts where that is possible. The challenges of that process suggest the value of family friendly employment conditions.

Paperless office

The paperless office is now considered to be a philosophy to work with minimal paper and convert all forms of documentation to a digital form. The ideal is driven by a number of motivators including productivity gains, costs savings, space saving, the need to share information etc.

Paper based documents transformed to digital based documents
One key aspect of the paperless office philosophy is the conversion of paper documents, photos, engineering plans, microfiche and all the other paper based systems to digital documents. The technologies that may be used include

1. scanners
2. high speed scanners - used for scanning very large volumes of paper.
3. book copiers - that take photos of large books and manuscripts.
4. wide format scanners - for scanning engineering drawings
5. photo scanners
6. negative scanners
7. microfiche scanner - used to convert microfiche to digital documents.
8. digitization of postal mail - online access of scanned contents
9. Fax to PDF conversion - made possible by companies such as voPaper

Each of the technologies uses software that converts the raster formats into other forms depending on need. Generally, they involve some form of compression technology that produces smaller raster images or the use of Optical character recognition, or OCR, to convert the document to text. A combination of OCR and raster is used to enable search ability while maintaining the original form of the document.

An issue faced by those wishing to take the paperless philosophy to the limit has been copyright laws. These laws restrict the transfer of documents protected by copyright from one medium to another, such as converting books to electronic format.

An important step in the paper-to-digital conversion is the need to label and catalog the scanned documents. Such labeling allows the scanned documents to be searched. Some technologies have been developed to do this, but generally involves either human cataloging or automated indexing on the OCR document.

However, scanners and software continue to improve, with small, portable scanners that are able to scan doubled-sided A4 documents at around 30-35ppm to a raster format (typically tiff fax 4 or pdf).

Issue in keeping documents digital

1. Business procedures and/or government regulations. These often slow the adoption of exclusively electronic documents.
2. The target readers' ability to receive and read the digital format.
3. The longevity of digital documents. Will they still be accessible to computer systems of the future?

Comparison of paperless vs traditional office philosophy
A traditional office consisted a paper-based filing systems, which may have included filing cabinets, folders, shelves, compactus's, microfiche systems, and drawing cabinets, all of which take up considerable space, requiring maintenance and equipment.

Meanwhile, a paperless office could simply consist of a desk, chair, computer (with a modest amount of local or network storage), scanner and printer, and the user could store all the information in digital form.

Historical prospective
The paperless office was a visionary or publicist's slogan, supposed to apply to the office of the future. The suggestion was that office automation would make paper redundant for routine tasks such as record-keeping and bookkeeping. It came to prominence in the days of the introduction of the personal computer. While the prediction of a PC on every desk was remarkably prescient (or, regarding it as marketing talk, very effective), the paperless nature of office work was less prophetic. Printers and photocopiers have made it much easier to produce documents in bulk, word-processing has deskilled secretarial work involved in writing those documents, and paper proliferates.

Paperless office is also a metaphor for the touting of new technology in terms of 'modernity' rather than its actual suitability to purpose.

An early prediction of the paperless office was made in a Business Week article in 1975.

Photocopiers

A photocopier is an office or home machine which makes paper copies of documents and other visual images quickly and cheaply. Most current photocopiers use a technology called xerography, a dry process using heat. (Copiers can also use other output technologies such as ink jet, but xerography is standard for office copying.)

Xerographic office photocopying was introduced by Xerox in the 1960s, and over the following 20 years it gradually replaced copies made by Verifax, Photostat, carbon paper, mimeograph machines, and other duplicating machines. The prevalence of its use is one of the factors that prevented the development of the paperless office heralded early in the digital revolution.

Photocopying is widely used in business, education, and government. There have been many predictions that photocopiers will eventually become obsolete as information workers continue to increase their digital document creation and distribution and rely less on distributing actual pieces of paper. However, photocopiers are undeniably more convenient than computers for the very common task of creating a copy of a piece of paper.

How a photocopier works

1. Charging: The surface of a cylindrical drum is given an electrostatic charge by either a high voltage wire called a corona wire or a charge roller. The drum is coated with a photoconductive material, such as selenium. A photoconductor is a semiconductor that becomes conductive when exposed to light.
2. Exposure: A bright lamp illuminates the original document, and the white areas of the original document reflect the light onto the surface of the photoconductive drum. The areas of the drum that are exposed to light (those areas that correspond to white areas of the original document) become conductive and therefore discharge to ground. The area of the drum not exposed to light (those areas that correspond to black portions of the original document) remain negatively charged. The result is a latent electrical image on the surface of the drum.
3. Developing: The toner is positively charged. When it is applied to the drum to develop the image, it is attracted and sticks to the areas that are negatively charged (black areas), just as paper sticks to a toy balloon with a static charge.
4. Transfer: The resulting toner image on the surface of the drum is transferred from the drum onto a piece of paper with a higher negative charge than the drum.
5. Fusing: The toner is melted and bonded to the paper by high-heat and high-pressure rollers.
6. Cleaning: The drum is wiped clean with a rubber blade and completely discharged by light before beginning the process again.
   

This example is of a negatively charged drum and paper, and positively charged toner. Some copiers employ the opposite: a positively charged drum and paper, and negatively charged toner.


Digital technology
In recent years, all new photocopiers have adopted digital technology, replacing the older analog technology. With digital copying, the copier effectively consists of an integrated scanner and laser printer. This design has several advantages, such as automatic image quality enhancement and the ability to "build jobs" or scan page images independently of the process of printing them. Some digital copiers can function as high-speed scanners; such models typically have the ability to send documents via email or make them available on a local area network.

The greatest advantage of a digital copier is "automatic digital collation." When copying a set of twenty pages twenty times, for example, a digital copier scans each page only once, then uses the stored information to produce twenty sets. In an analog copier, either each page is scanned twenty times (a total of 400 scans), making one set at a time, or twenty separate output trays are used for the twenty sets.

Low-end copiers also use digital technology, but they tend to consist of a standard PC scanner coupled to an inkjet or low-end laser printer, both of which are far slower than their counterparts in high-end copiers. However, low-end scanner inkjets can provide color copying at a far lower cost than a traditional color copier. The cost of electronics is such that combined scanner-printers sometimes have built-in fax machines.

Copyright issues
Photocopying material which is subject to copyright (such as books or scientific papers) is subject to restrictions in most countries. It is common practice, especially by students, as the cost of purchasing a book for the sake of one article or a few pages may be excessive. The principle of fair use (in the United States) or fair dealing (in other Berne Convention countries) allows this type of copying for research purposes.

In some countries, such as Canada, some universities pay royalties from each photocopy made at university copy machines and copy centers to copyright collectives out of the revenues from the photocopying and these collectives distribute these funds to various scholarly publishers. In the United States, photocopied compilations of articles, handouts, graphics, and other information called readers are often required texts for college classes. Either the instructor or the copy center is responsible for clearing copyright for every article in the reader and attribution information is included in the front of the reader.

Scanners

Scanner which is an office supplies in computing, a scanner is a device that analyzes images, printed text, or handwriting, or an object (such as an ornament) and converts it to a digital image. Most scanners today are variations of the desktop (or flatbed) scanner. The flatbed scanner is the most common in offices. Hand-held scanners, where the device is moved by hand, were briefly popular but are now not used due to the difficulty of obtaining a high-quality image. Both these types of scanners use charge-coupled device (CCD) or Contact Image Sensor (CIS) as the image sensor, whereas older drum scanners use a photomultiplier tube as the image sensor.

Another category of office and home scanner is a rotary scanner used for high-speed document scanning. This is another kind of drum scanner, but it uses a CCD array instead of a photomultiplier.

Other types of scanners are planetary scanners, which take photographs of books and documents, and 3D scanners, for producing three-dimensional models of objects, but this type of scanner is considerably more expensive relative to other types of scanners.

Another category of scanner are digital camera scanners which are based on the concept of reprographic cameras. Due to the increasing resolution and new features such as anti-shake, digital cameras become an attractive alternative to regular scanners. While still containing disadvantages compared to traditional scanners, digital cameras offer unmatched advantages in speed and portability.

Types of scanners
Nowadays there are different types of office and home scanners depending on users purposes. Described below are the most commonly used types that can be found in the market:

1. Drum
Drum scanners capture image information with photomultiplier tubes (PMT) rather than the charged coupled device (CCD) arrays found in flatbed scanners and inexpensive film scanners. Reflective and transmissive originals are mounted to an acrylic cylinder, the scanner drum, which rotates at high speed while it passes the object being scanned in front of precision optics that deliver image information to the PMTs. Most modern color drum scanners use 3 matched PMTs, which read red, blue and green light respectively. Light from the original artwork is split into separate red, blue and green beams in the optical bench of the scanner.

The drum scanner gets its name from the large glass drum on which the original artwrok is mounted for scanning, the are usually 11"x17" in size, but maximum size varies by mauufacturer. One of the unique features of drum scanners is the ability to control sample area and aperture size independently. The sample size is the area that the scanner encoder reads to create an individual pixel. The aperture is the actual opening that allows light into the optical bench of the scanner. The ability to control aperture and sample size separately is particularly useful for smoothing film grain when scanning black and white and color negative originals.

While drum scanners are capable of scanning both reflective and transmissive artwork, a good quality flatbed scanner can produce excellent scans from reflective artwork. As a result, drum scanners are rarely used to scan prints now that high quality inexpensive flatbed scanners are readily available. Film, however, is where drum scanners continue to be the tool of choice for high-end applications. Because film can be wet mounted to the scanner drum and because of the exceptional sensitivity of the PMTs, drum scanners are capable of capturing very subtle details in film originals.

Currently only a few companies continue to manufacture drum scanners. While prices of both new and used units have come down over the last decade they still require a considerable monetary investment when compared to CCD flatbed and film scanners. However, drum scanners remain in demand due to their capacity to produce scans which are superior in resolution, color gradation and value structure. Also, since drum scanners are capable of resolutions up to 12,000 PPI, their use is generally recommended when a scanned image is going to be enlarged.

In most current graphic arts operations, very high quality flatbed scanners have replaced drum scanners, being both less expensive and faster. However, drum scanners continue to be used in high-end applications, such as museum-quality archiving of photographs and print production of high-quality books and magazine advertisements. In addition, due to the greater availability of pre-owned units many fine art photographers are acquiring drum scanners, which has created a new niche market for the machines.

The first image scanner ever developed was a drum scanner. It was built in 1957 at the US National Bureau of Standards by a team led by Russell Kirsch. The first image ever scanned on this machine was a 5 cm square photograph of Kirsch's then-three-month-old son, Walden. The black and white image had a resolution of 176 pixels on a side.

2. Flatbed
A flatbed office scanner is usually composed of a glass pane (or platen), under which there is a bright light (often xenon or cold cathode fluorescent) which illuminates the pane, and a moving optical array, whether CCD or CIS. Color scanners typically contain three rows (arrays) of sensors with red, green, and blue filters. Images to be scanned are placed face down on the glass, an opaque cover is lowered over it to exclude ambient light, and the sensor array and light source move across the pane reading the entire area. An image is therefore visible to the charge-coupled device only because of the light it reflects. Transparent images do not work in this way, and require special accessories that illuminate them from the upper side.

3. Hand
Hand office scanners are manual devices which are dragged across the surface of the image to be scanned. Scanning documents in this manner requires a steady hand, as an uneven scanning rate would produce distorted images. They typically have a "start" button which is held by the user for the duration of the scan, some switches to set the optical resolution, and a roller which generates a clock pulse for synchronisation with the computer. Most hand scanners were monochrome, and produced light from an array of green LEDs to illuminate the image. A typical hand scanner also had a small window through which the document being scanned could be viewed. They were popular during the early 1990s and usually had a proprietary interface module specific to a particular type of computer, usually an Atari ST or Commodore Amiga.

Quality
Office scanners typically read red-green-blue color (RGB) data from the array. This data is then processed with some proprietary algorithm to correct for different exposure conditions and sent to the computer, via the device's input/output interface (usually SCSI or LPT in machines pre-dating the USB standard). Color depth varies depending on the scanning array characteristics, but is usually at least 24 bits. High quality models have 48 bits or more color depth. The other qualifying parameter for a scanner is its resolution, measured in pixels per inch (ppi), sometimes more accurately referred to as samples per inch (spi). Instead of using the scanner's true optical resolution, the only meaningful parameter, manufacturers like to refer to the interpolated resolution, which is much higher thanks to software interpolation. As of 2004, a good flatbed scanner has an optical resolution of 1600–3200 ppi, high-end flatbed scanners can scan up to 5400 ppi, and a good drum scanner has an optical resolution of 8000–14,000 ppi.

Manufacturers often claim interpolated resolutions as high as 19,200 ppi; but such numbers carry little meaningful value, because the number of possible interpolated pixels is unlimited. The higher the resolution, the larger the file. In most cases, there is a trade-off between manageable file size and level of detail.

The third important parameter for an office scanner is its density range. A high density range means that the office scanner is able to reproduce shadow details and brightness details in one scan.

Paper size

The international paper size standard, ISO 216, is based on the German DIN 476 standard for paper sizes. Using the metric system, the base format is a sheet of paper measuring 1 m² in area (A0 paper size). Successive paper sizes in the series A1, A2, A3, etc., are defined by halving the preceding paper size parallel to its shorter side. The most frequently used paper size is A4 (210 × 297 mm).

This standard has been adopted by all countries in the world except the United States and Canada. In Mexico, Colombia, Chile and the Philippines, despite the ISO standard having been officially adopted, the U.S. "letter" format is still in common use.

ISO paper sizes are all based on a single aspect ratio of the square root of two, or approximately 1:1.4142. The advantages of basing a paper size upon this ratio were already noted in 1786 by the German scientist Georg Lichtenberg (in a letter to Johann Beckmann): if a sheet with aspect ratio √2 is horizontally divided into two equal halves, then the halves will again have aspect ratio √2. In the beginning of the twentieth century, Dr Walter Porstmann turned Lichtenberg's idea into a proper system of different paper sizes. Porstmann's system was introduced as a DIN standard (DIN 476) in Germany in 1922, replacing a vast variety of other paper formats. Even today the paper sizes are called "DIN A4" in everyday use in Germany.

Comparison of the most common paper sizes. Click on the image to enlarge it

Laser printers

Laser printers are office supplies that have many significant advantages over other types of printers. Unlike impact printers, laser printer speed can vary widely, and depends on many factors, including the graphic intensity of the job being processed. The fastest models can print over 200 monochrome pages per minute (12,000 pages per hour). The fastest color office laser printers can print over 100 pages per minute (6000 pages per hour). Very high-speed laser printers are used for mass mailings of personalized documents, such as credit card or utility bills, and are competing with lithography in some commercial applications.

The cost of this technology depends on a combination of factors, including inflation, the cost of paper, toner, and infrequent drum replacement, as well as the replacement of other consumables such as the fuser assembly and transfer assembly. Often printers with soft plastic drums can have a very high cost of ownership that does not become apparent until the drum requires replacement.

A duplexing printer (one that prints on both sides of the paper) can halve paper costs and reduce filing volumes. Formerly only available on high-end printers, duplexers are now common on mid-range office printers, though not all printers can accommodate a duplexing unit. Duplexing can also give a slower page-printing speed, because of the longer paper path.

In comparison with the office laser printer, most inkjet and dot-matrix printers simply take an incoming stream of data and directly imprint it in a slow lurching process that may include pauses as the printer waits for more data. An office laser printer is unable to work this way because such a large amount of data needs to output to the printing device in a rapid, continuous process. The printer cannot stop the mechanism precisely enough to wait until more data arrives, without creating a visible gap or misalignment of the dots on the printed page.

Instead the image data is built up and stored in a large bank of memory capable of representing every dot on the page. The requirement to store all dots in memory before printing has traditionally limited laser printers to small fixed paper sizes such as letter or A4. Most office laser printers are unable to print continuous banners spanning a sheet of paper two meters long, because there is not enough memory available in the printer to store such a large image before printing begins.

Advantages and disadvantages of using inkjet printers

Advantages

1. Compared to earlier consumer-oriented printers, inkjets have a number of advantages. They are quieter in operation than impact dot matrix or daisywheel printers. They can print finer, smoother details through higher printhead resolution, and many inkjets with photorealistic-quality color printing are widely available.
2. In comparison to more expensive technologies like thermal wax, dye sublimations, and laser printers, inkjets have the advantage of practically no warm up time and lower cost per page (except when compared to laser printers).
3. Present-day inkjet printers use stochastic or FM screening, which gives better-quality results than low-cost laser printers when printing photographic images. Some inkjet printers print dots of more than one size, so that the screening is not purely "FM".
4. For some inkjet printers, monochrome ink sets are available either from the printer manufacturer or third-party suppliers. These allow the inkjet printer to compete with the silver-based photographic papers traditionally used in black-and-white photography, and provide the same range of tones – neutral, "warm" or "cold". When switching between full-color and monochrome ink sets, it is necessary to flush out the old ink from the print head with a special cleaning cartridge.
5. As opposed to most other types of printers, inkjet cartridges can be refilled. Most cartridges can be easily refilled by drilling a hole in and filling the tank portion of the cartridge. This method is more cost effective as opposed to buying a new cartridge each time one runs dry.
   

Disadvantages

Inkjet printers may have a number of disadvantages:

1. The ink is often very expensive (for a typical OEM cartridge priced at $15, containing 5 ml of ink, the ink effectively costs $3000 per liter)
2. Many "intelligent" ink cartridges contain a microchip that communicates the estimated ink level to the printer; this may cause the printer to display an error message, or incorrectly inform the user that the ink cartridge is empty. In some cases, these messages can be ignored, but many inkjet printers will refuse to print with a cartridge that declares itself empty, in order to prevent consumers from refilling cartridges.
3. The lifetime of inkjet prints is limited; they may eventually fade and the color balance may change.
4. Because the ink used in most inkjets is water-soluble, care must be taken with inkjet-printed documents to avoid even the smallest drop of water, which can cause severe "blurring" or "running." Similarly, water-based highlighter markers can blur inkjet-printed documents.
   

These disadvantages have been addressed in a variety of ways:

1. Third-party ink suppliers sell ink cartridges at significantly reduced costs (often 10%-30% of OEM cartridge prices) and also sell kits to refill cartridges, and bulk ink, at even lower prices.
2. Many vendors' "intelligent" ink cartridges have been reverse-engineered. It is now possible to buy inexpensive devices to reliably reset such cartridges to report themselves as full, so that they may be refilled many times.
3. Print lifetime is highly dependent on the quality and formulation of the ink, as well as the paper chosen. The earliest inkjet printers, intended for home and small office applications, used dye-based inks. Even the best dye-based inks are not as durable as pigment-based inks, which are now available for many inkjet printers
   

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Office supplies

Office supplies is the generic term that refers to all supplies regularly used in offices by businesses and other organizations, from private citizens to governments, who works with the collection, refinement, and output of information (colloquially referred to as "paper work").

The term office supplies includes small, expendable, daily use items such as paper clips, staples, hole punches, binders, laminators, writing utensils and paper, but also encompasses higher-cost equipment like computers, printers, fax machines and photocopiers, as well as office furniture.