Ricoh News & Articles

This week, the Document Foundation releases the first full version of LibreOffice -- and puts it up to Oracle's Open Office, Blackberry users will soon be able to access their SharePoint documents, Doculex enhances document collaboration and Ricoh changes direction.

Last September, Xerox launched a very expensive campaign to rebrand itself as a document management heavyweight. This week, Xerox's MFP rival, Ricoh (news, site), has just announced that it will be investing US$ 300 million over three years to “aggressively” accelerate its shift into the managed document services or outsourced document management space.

It's a new year and we bring you a new weekly column with a roll-up of what’s happening in the global document management software space. This series will focus on major news events, research and trends, it will complement another new column which will focus on document management and enterprise 2.0 news exclusively for SMBs (stay tuned).

Despite a slow start to the year this week has brought some interesting research from Gartner and AIIM, a stack of fancy awards for Autonomy and some intriguing new partnerships.

A branch of the Ricoh tree called IKON Office Solutions, Inc. recently established a reseller relationship with Omtool, provider of document capture and handling solutions.

The partnership is expected to turn the heads of law firms as it adds Omtool’s AccuRoute, a document scanning and distribution software tool, to IKON’s legal doc management portfolio. AccuRoute is designed to streamline the capture to archive process of both paper and electronic documents into information management systems.

“IKON is pleased to add the Omtool product to our suite of solutions to enable law firms to improve their document workflow and increase efficiency,” said Mark Davey, IKON’s Vice President, Legal Enterprise Solutions. “With the current economic conditions that law firms are facing, everyone is being asked to do more. Having the right tools available is more critical than ever.”

If this strikes a chord, you should hang around booth #400 at ILTA’s 2009 Annual Conference next week where both companies will be presenting. Check out our events list here for more information.

More good things are coming from old partnerships, the latest being a global strategic alliance between Ricoh Americas Corporation and the ever-popular IBM, spearheaded by Ricoh's new offering - Document Security and Management Services.

The diversified office automation equipment and electronics provider, Ricoh Americus Corporation, recently announced the internal deployment of their document storage and management SaaS solution — DocumentMall for Salesforce.com.

Though the company was originally formed with the coupling of IBM’s Printing Systems Division with Ricoh’s hardware solutions has been servicing customers since January, the union is now official with the launch of InfoPrint Solutions Company.