Argos News

Today we’re pleased to announce the release of Argos 7.0.10. The big-ticket item here — something that’s literally years in the making — is phone tracking. There are lots of other new features, plus the usual minor fixes and improvements.

Track your phone calls

Argos 7 now tracks phone calls. If you’ve never thought about tracking phone calls, now’s a good time to consider it. Like printing and copying, voice communication is a huge potential revenue source for firms that charge for reimbursables. Up until now, media types in Argos have been paper-oriented. Starting today we introduce a new family of phone-based media that are duration-based instead of dimension- and page-based. Argos phone tracking measures the length of your calls.

A better way to bill for phone calls

When we introduced copy tracking, we wanted to avoid the pitfalls of traditional cost recovery that we experienced firsthand as practicing architects all those years ago. Pre-billed cost recovery — where you’re required to enter a job code before you can work — is immensely frustrating and rife with abuse. If you’ve ever lived with call accounting before, you probably lived the pre-billing life: your phone system prevents you from making outside calls until you punch in a job code. And if you’re like most people, you quickly learn the override code (99999, anyone?) and use it forevermore.

Argos works differently. You make your call as usual. Then, when you hang up, the Argos Desktop Client pops up on your desktop and requires you to allocate the call to a job code. It’s the same workflow that makes Argos Copy Tracking great, and it’s available for phone tracking today. Based on rules, Argos determines whether the call was internal, local, long-distance, or international. You get to decide costing for each, then run reports that show your printing, copying, and phone calls all presented together in a clear, logical way.

Compatibility

Today we’re offering support for Cisco Call Manager and 3Com NBX systems. NEC support is up next. Only those few? You use something else? That’s okay. We’ll provide you with a tool to capture the output stream of your phone system. Send the results to us and we’ll deliver a driver. Over time we’ll support more systems. It turns out that many PBX and phone systems use a common reporting scheme called CDR, so it’s actually quite likely that we’ll be able to support your system, even if it’s not listed.

More 7.0.10 features

Separate copy and scan billing

This is actually an important capability. Argos 7 introduced the idea of different handling for different kinds of jobs. For example you could track printing silently but copying interactively. Initially we provided three job groups:

• Printing
• Copying and scanning
• Phone and fax

Some customers want to handle scanning differently from copying; our original Argos 7 scheme didn’t allow this. As of today, scanning is separated from copying so you can set behaviors more granularly.

Page impression tracking on Xerox

Most Argos copy tracking solutions can distinguish between simplex and duplex activity. You can assign each to a different media type and, hence, charge differently for each. In practice, though, many customers pay for their MFP equipment based on impressions — the number of page sides that pass through a device. A simplex job is one impression; a duplex job is two. Argos OnBoard for Xerox 7.0.10 introduces per-impression pricing, which lets Argos more closely model the way you actually pay for your equipment. Look for per-impression pricing capability to find its way into our other OnBoard solutions in the coming months.

New reports

Phone tracking required some new reporting capabilities, so we took the opportunity to improve the way the reports work. Take a look; hopefully you’ll like it.

Try it today

If you’re maintenance plan is up-to-date you’re entitled to upgrade to Argos 7.0.10. Download it here. Still have questions? Contact us. We’re excited about Argos 7.0.10 and we hope you like it.