As the year winds down I thought it would be fun to briefly take stock of the past year. As always, it’s been a year of change in many organizations. Consider the changes at the top at Sharp, Kyocera Mita, and Ricoh, to name just a few. Add to that internal turmoil at HP and round and round and round it goes. MPS remains all the rage and there’s a lot of talk of late about managed services. Expect to see more of that kind of talk in the coming year.

We’ve seen a few acquisitions, as we always do. Companies such as Nuance became stronger via acquisition (Equitrac) while Konica Minolta expanded into IT services via the acquisition of All Covered, which has continued to acquire smaller IT services companies since they were acquired. Muratec came roaring back to life witnessed by their dealer meeting that underscores their commitment to the dealer channel and bolstered by the announcement of many new products that will make them a more viable secondary line than ever before. Speaking of secondary product lines, Lexmark further established themselves this year as a force to be reckoned with in the channel and don’t be surprised if they build on that foundation in 2012.

Meanwhile, The Week in Imaging continues to grow as we wind down our first year of operations this month. It’s turned out to be a good year. We’ve seen traffic to the site grow along with the number of registered subscribers to the site (registration to receive the weekly e-mail blast is free), and I’m happy to say we’ve added a variety of sponsors who not only provide valuable products and services to the office technology dealer channel, but have allowed us to grow as well.

What will next year bring? Likely more of the same—personnel changes, acquisitions, more MPS and MS, and from a personal perspective hopefully more new sponsors.

Next week I’m rolling out the first group of year-end highlights. My goal is to present 52 highlights from 52 companies, representing the 52 weeks of the year, over the final three weeks of the year in The Week in Imaging. I’m one third of the way there and plugging away to get the rest. Can I do it? I think I can. After checking out this week’s issue be sure and come back next week, the week after, and the week after that to see just how successful I was in rounding up 52 responses from 52 companies. I kid you not, it’s harder than it sounds.

New content this week includes: