This article first appeared on the Imaging Channel
With more organizations embracing the hybrid workplace model, employees need the ability to use a printer even when they’re not in the office with direct access to the device.
That’s where remote printing comes in. Remote printing allows you to print from anywhere, at any time – whether you’re working from home or on the go.
But is it time to reconsider what we know of as remote printing?
Remote printing should be redefined as flexible printing. When you connect anything on your phone, you expect it to work no matter what connection you’re on. It should be the same with printing, whether you’re at home, connected to the guest Wi-Fi, or run quickly to the café downstairs and want to pick something up in the office later.
It’s about that flexibility of having access to everything you need to do your job without being connected to a specific network.
Meeting a growing demand
Until 2020, BYOD was the primary driver for remote printing. If someone is at home – or in other places where they’re working from their own device, like colleges and hospitals – then they need a pathway to get their print job into the trusted printer network without compromising security.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, suddenly large swathes of the workforce around the world were working remotely. Although this drove an immediate increase in demand for remote printing, it ignited a long-term demand for flexible printing.
It was no longer acceptable to have to connect to an office network to access documents, applications or even printing.
Organizations embracing this flexibility inherently also improve their security, as security-conscious organizations have already for years considered their local staff network as untrusted.
Even as organizations return to the office, we’re seeing an increase in the amount of printing happening from outside the office network, as seen by 25,000 businesses worldwide adopting our Cloud Print in Mobility Print offering and around 100 new businesses joining every three days.
The key to successful flexible printing
In a nutshell, flexible printing needs to be secure, fast, convenient and affordable. Let’s unpack that.
It is important that a cloud-based print solution incorporates several measures to keep printed documents secure. The best of them should offer the well-established and trusted WebRTC technology to create peer-to-peer communication to transmit print jobs over the internet. This is the same technology currently used in popular conferencing software and audio communication platforms.
Sending a print job securely over the internet is pointless if it comes out of a printer where anyone can pick it up. A popular feature our customers use alongside Cloud Print is Find-Me printing.
With Find-Me printing, staff print their documents to a Find-Me printer, and when they arrive at the office or campus, they swipe their badge at any MFD to release their job. This feature not only helps with security but also helps with convenience and cutting costs by avoiding wasteful uncollected print jobs.
Flexible printing needs to be fast. Print jobs can be hundreds of megabytes in size. If a staff member is in the office, their print jobs should stay local. And only if they’re off-network should their print job traverse the internet. This has been our philosophy across all our products.
Convenience and affordability go hand-in-hand. Almost all IT teams we talk to mention that their teams have shrunk, and they feel overwhelmed. They cannot afford to hire someone to just look after printing, so they need solutions that make it easy to manage and support.
Our approach has been to give admins a single pane of glass to manage print queues and drivers for all the operating systems in their environment, and give them the ability to share those print queues to users on managed or self-managed devices without having to personally interact with each user.
Making the switch to remote
Before jumping into solution mode, my recommendation is to look at what else you might want to get out of your MFDs and printers.
For example, as most organizations by now have moved away from on-prem shared storage, it makes sense to look at scanning directly to cloud storage like Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox etc. That’s just one example.
I’ve personally spoken to hundreds, if not thousands of our customers over the years, from small five-person ‘mom-and-pop’ shops to global enterprise businesses with hundreds of thousands of employees.
When I look back at the ones where staff members LOVED their new print solution, the biggest factor was communication. Where IT teams shared and showed the convenience of printing from anywhere and releasing on any MFD, staff loved it.
Quite often, IT teams want to reduce the amount of desktop printers in their environment, and they use print management as a way to achieve this.
Although this is not a bad idea, if the first thing you discuss with staff is about taking something away instead of starting with the added convenience, they will put a 10x value on the taken away thing and you will struggle to win their hearts back.
My second last tip, plan for future flexibility. If you’re only using Windows laptops and Azure today, you might not next year. If you’re using a single brand of MFDs today, you might want negotiation power at your next lease renewal.
I recommend you implement a solution that gives you the flexibility to change the rest of your environment.
My last tip – your environment is most likely not as unique as you think, even if it seems like it. Forums are your unbiased friends, whether you want to ask questions or share what you did. And it goes without saying, your friendly local print provider has seen every print environment ever.
Remote printing today is printing what you need, when you need it and where you need it, and implementing it has never been easier or more secure.
