Scanning Disasters with Xerox Phaser 8560MFP…

Scanning can be tough with this machine!

You ever buy something and think for sure you have made the perfect purchase?  Even as a reseller, we can make critical mistakes that can cost us time, energy and money!  One recent example we had of such a situation was with the Xerox Phaser 8560MFP color copier.  We had purchased it for a small marketing company because it does an excellent job with color copies and color printing.  We soon learned, that though this color mfp is great for most Houston customers, this mfp was not perfect for the group we sold the copier to.

We got onsite and unboxed the color copier.  It takes about 15 minutes to unbox and to get ready to plug in. We are used to this.  Once the Xerox Phaser 8560MFP is plugged in, it takes about 15 minutes or so to warm up and makes all sorts of weird sounds.  Again, not a big deal as we were anticipating this as well.  We hooked up the color copier and then next was the printer.  The printer installed really easily and so we moved to scanning next.  This is where we hit a problem.

The customer had Server 2008 and the machines that were onsite were the type that would go onsite and offsite often (laptops).  The Xerox Phaser 8560MFP acts in such a way that if you want the scan to folder to work, the color copier has to work through a computer that remains onsite.  The only onsite computer was Server 2008 and Xerox has a print driver, but not a scan driver for 2008.  We called the engineers at Xerox and asked them what they thought would be best.  They said we could toss a computer into the server room and then load the necessary driver software through the computer and since it would not be moving, that should resolve the problem.

The customer was not on board with this idea.  It is another computer to manage and what if it broke down?  So, the tech answer was to buy a computer to make a copier work and the customer answer was to make the copier work without a screwy work around.  After making many calls to Xerox, we learned the Phaser 8560MFP is just not a very good solution to robust network scanning as it does not support SMB scanning.  We wound up moving the Phaser 8560 to another client and sold this client the Xerox WorkCentre 6400/X instead.  It was a hard lesson, took many hours, but ultimately experiences like these help us be a better Houston copier company than our competitors.  We work hard to learn from our mistakes!

Please give us a call for a copier quote in Houston!