For the past couple of years I've been posting short snippets of comments from me and our members about selling copiers. These are posting in our weekly series below.
This Week in the Copier Industry 5 Years Ago
This Week in the Copier Industry 10 Years Ago
This Week in the Copier Industry 15 Years Ago
I'm not sure how many are clicking the links to those stories, thus I thought I would start a blog series dedicated to our members and their experiences with selling copiers.
A sales rep sold a Ricoh MP C4504ex
So here's a new one that has me stumped.
A sales rep sold a Ricoh MP C4504ex to a real estate company. The company was hoping to bill back the realtors for copies and prints and have the users authenticate via the key cards with the Ricoh QCA and card reader.
Everything is great on paper but no one brought up to the rep (and they didn't involve their solutions manager , yours truly, on the initial conversation) that 60% of the realtors use macs and lo and behold QCA doesn't work with Macs at this time.
This landed in my lap 2 days ago and after a lot of looking I found out that Print Audit should be able to fix this, but it's still stuck in Ricoh QC so we're looking at a few months before this is ready for prime time.
What I figured was maybe we could just do some sort of faux 2-step authentication for 90 days where:
Users would use the Ricoh print drivers with a user code to send jobs.
Badge swipe would only unlock the Ricoh.
Old-school Ricoh user codes would be turned on so users would still have to enter their user code to completely unlock the device to retrieve print jobs or copy.
Not the prettiest way to make this work but for 2-3 months until Print Audit rolled out but it's the only thing I could think of to make this work.
Received a call this morning from a Ricoh engineer who shot me down this morning saying that if card authentication is turned on it turns off user codes so that idea is dead.
The only other idea I can think of would be PaperCut but as a Print Audit IUM partner just rigging something for 90-days or so would make this so much easier with out eating all of the reps profits.
I'm fresh out of ideas on this, anybody else have anything? If it works I'll instruct the rep that we owe the winning solution a nice bottle of something to send over your way.
Thanks as always,
John Mooney
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