We had a horrible experience last year with printers and copiers. The machines we had all seemed to point at just one thing: trouble. At one point, I was running between printer, copier, my lesson plan, and several computer terminals as I tried to get printouts for my colleagues and my own classes done. It was quite a frustrating experience.

At that point, we made several decisions: one to replace the photocopier machine, and to buy a laser jet. While we didn’t get a good replacement for the copier until just a few months ago, we did find a good replacement for our printers. We opted for a laserjet printer that could handle about the level of our workload, approximately 2,500 pages per month with ease. It also eased having to run between the photocopier and the printer, which is what we had been doing when we were using inkjet printers (which btw were horribly expensive, too!).

If you take a look at Dell’s website, you’ll see an equivalent printer, the Dell Laser Printer 1110, which is about the same price and standard, though this is not the one we bought! We didn’t have the choice!

For our current needs, though, given that we have a full copier available that is networked, I think we’d opt for a much different model. I have my eye on something like the top of the range model:

This is the Dell Multifunction Colour Laser Printer 3115cn. This printer scanner copier really would serve a lot of our small business needs. It has a bigger cartridge that can print nearly 5,000 copies, monochrome for worksheets and letters, color for graphics, cards and flyers, scanning (of course) for the students ‘works of art’, and a fax machine!

As a result of our experience, we learned a number of valuable lessons. When you are evalutating printing equipment, there are a number of things you need to be aware of:

reliability above all else – the machines have to work without trouble;

support is at hand – when they fail, and they will, you need to find people to get them operating quickly;

network stability and interoperability – we found this most perplexing as several of the machines we tried wouldn’t ‘plug’n’play’ with our mixed network ( we used English/Chinese systems running win98/XP/XPsp1/2 );

predictability of cost – while we weren’t so concerned about the cost, we found it difficult to figure out how much each page cost. This made it hard for our business to figure out what the value was – were we getting a good deal? could we buy a more economical printer?

quality of output – we had LOTS of problems with the old copier producing really poor quality copy. Printouts would leave the machine, and toner would literally crumble in your hands. Other times, the words or pictures would be really poorly copied. Paper would be torn by the machine, crumpled occasionally.

cost vs. benefit – we also found that with all the problems, we spent more time troubleshooting the printing problems than we had the patience to deal with, we were spending time, and therefore losing opportunities to work more efficiently at looking after our students, recruiting, and so on. Eventually, we realized that buying a cheap printer really did NOT make financial or economic sense. It was actually costing us money.

Once you have all of these in hand, you should find it much easier to purchase a good printer!

Sponsored by Dell.Uk.

Yes, today, we’re testing out Google Apps.. Originally, Google Apps started out with just a few additional programs or services, such as the Webpage, then creating webpages, then offered us a viable way to integrate them into our website.

Well, I tried it out for 24 hours, and it was quite impressive. Then I set up a domain as instructed. And logged out of my account. This is when I found that I could NOT log back in, no matter what I tried. I thought the service was tied to my Google Account. But no luck! And the password was restricted.

I tried the accounts that I knew about… Very frustrating. I’m normally VERY careful about stuff like that! But it seems there is a glitch in the system somewhere. I don’t know what happened.

Suggestion to Google: make sure that applicants get their new email addresses at least somewhere retyped so that they don’t forget. There is no way to retrieve such information at the moment!

Update: I remember what the email address is thankfully… but… it wasn’t an easy process.

Google Documents is relatively new to the scene, arriving significantly after Word XP, and even OpenOffice Version 2. Naturally, in some areas it is much weaker than its offline counterparts. But there are a number of areas where its ease of use, its online nature and its collaboration features really help to set it apart from its offline relatives.

Here’s what the editor looks like for Documents:

And the Spreadsheet Tools looks like this!

Ease of Use

Its entire interface is controled from the central area pictured below:

In fact the interface has been redesigned with drag and drop type features, folders and an increasing number of actions that can be performed on all files. Files can be saved online or downloaded in a number of important formats, including DOC, PDF and HTML. The Folders features has allowed something of a more effective way to drag and drop items and keep your interface tidy. I’m quite glad that Google decided to drop ‘tags’ in Docs… It just didn’t seem such a comfortable fit with the folder based desktop that is common on the XP/Vista/Mac/Linux desktop these days.

You can see in the above diagram how the item I selected changes to blue, and can be ‘dropped’ onto a folder on the left hand side. Very neat.

Its online, its offline, no, wait, it’s online!

While there isn’t much you can do when you can’t go online yet! But there are enough features that make waiting to go online much more desirable. Still, when you can’t access an online connection, it might make sense to download your documents in an editable format and upload your documents later. Naturally, when you do this, you will need to make sure that the documents are being edited as you are offline. When you upload the new document, you will surely overwrite the changes made between then and when you originally downloaded the document. There is certainly now no way to ‘merge’ documents in such a fashion, though this would be quite a desirable feature.

Collaboration Rules

But the one factor that stands head and shoulders above all the others must surely be the collaboration features that have been built into Google Docs from the ground up. You are able to set a number of collaboration features: including sharing (with viewers and collaborators), publishing including the document and posting to a blog; a revisions record that lets you see what has changed from the first time to the last time, and in Spreadsheets there is even a ‘Chat’ feature that you can use.

And the downside?

There are considerable downsides to Google Documents that a good Office program can easily remedy, including offline features, uneven development between the Document and Spreadsheets features, poor integration between the two (can you paste into one or the other? Well, yes, but you lose the formatting) and serious limitations in the size of the files (500K! What’s that a longish letter these days?).

However, for Bloggers who collaborate, are constantly connected to the InterWeb, and find the limitations imposed by Wordpress for drafting, Google Docs might be a good solution. And you can post direct to your blog, too!… So, write out a draft, post to WordPress, edit and publish!… Let’s try it and see.