We’ll all be familiar with that moment before an essential meeting; you’re at the printer to get a print job but rather get sifting through piles of paper wanting to locate your document in amongst those of one’s colleagues and goodness knows what else. Or you’re in a different part of the office and you realise you’ve printed those papers you needed seriously to the wrong device… It could be surprising to hear that both of the scenarios outlined here are entirely avoidable and with an easy follow-me printing solution, could quickly become anything of the past. Follow-me,
centralised printing or ‘secure print’ while the technology is also referred to, ensures that documents are just ever printed when they are ‘requested’ or ‘pulled’ from certain device by an official user, so they are never left piling up unclaimed and could be collected from wherever is most convenient or quickest for that specific user. Besides those individual user benefits, for almost any organisation, follow-me printing is really a straightforward way to cut paper waste, spread printing burdens and improve document security. Here, we offer an introduction to the technology and an outline of a few of follow-me printing’s main advantages…
Introduction
In most frequent printing environments without follow-me printing capabilities, users themselves decide exactly where they want to print a report while still at their workstation. Most will tend to select the closest operational printer and/or the one that prints in the colour they require. In offices where there are multiple devices being used, it’s very easy to produce mistakes as it pertains to choosing where you can send documents. A digit or even a letter wrong on a drop-down printer menu and a report reaches the wrong printer on one other side of the building. Or perhaps a user chooses the closest device which also is actually the most popular; and so valuable time is spent at the printer while other users’ jobs are increasingly being executed. The traditional system is pretty haphazard at the most effective of times but in the worst light, it’s frequently slow, fairly inefficient and not necessarily the absolute most cost-effective. Follow-me printing can address all these issues.
Follow-Me Printing
By staging and compartmentalising the printing process, follow-me printing can effectively eliminate the problems outlined above in addition to the 利是封印刷 associated financial and time costs. Unlike conventional printing, where a user is networked right to a computer device, follow-me printing deploys a print server among devices and users’ jobs. Where as ordinarily, when a user selects ‘print’ the work will start to be processed instantly by way of a chosen device, follow-me printing first sends the work to a print server. It is only when a user approaches certain device, which may be any device on the network which is why that user has authorization that the work is ‘pulled’ from the server, where it has been temporarily stored and executed, ‘on demand’, there and then. To pull work (or jobs) from a computer device, depending on the hardware installed, users either type in a person ID code to spot themselves, or if a card reader has been installed on a computer device, place their ID cards on the card sensor or swipe their cards, where there’s a magnetic reader installed.
Outside the specific scenarios outlined above, the many benefits of a follow-me printing system are as follows:
Enhanced Document Security
Among the major advantages of follow-me printing is the significantly higher quantities of security it provides, when compared with more conventional printing arrangements. Security is actually one of the very most frequently cited reasons for organisations making the transition to follow-me printing configurations.
As users are expected to be at a computer device due to their print job(s) to be processed, follow-me printing can practically eliminate the situation of lost printed documents. Furthermore, whether a user collects their job having an ID card or instead identifies him/herself with a PIN logon, the follow-me printing system can make sure that only the authorized user is able to pick-up the jobs which they’ve submitted. And as print jobs aren’t executed unless they are ‘pulled’ from a computer device by a user, there’s much less danger of your more sensitive or especially important documents being seen by unauthorized individuals or being accidentally carried away with another person’s printing.
Finally, nearly all the more commonly-used follow-me printing solutions provide a higher level of data Encryption to ensure that documents remain completely secure while they are in digital form. This ensures that when your printer network becomes victim of an unauthorized attack, all jobs on the print server remain safe and secure.
Greater Accountability
Besides the most obvious cost savings that can come from eliminating those unnecessary print jobs which remain unclaimed on a computer device, a follow-me printing solution provides organisations with the powers to introduce greater quantities of user accountability. As all print jobs move across the follow-me print server and always remain linked to certain user ID, follow-me printing provides administrators with highly centralised management control and the ability to assign costs per user, by cost centre, department, project or by way of a specific cost code or printer. By budgeting your printing with such means, if there’s a specific department as well as a person in a organization regularly exceeding print budgets, this is often redressed immediately upon installing a follow-me printing solution.
A More Streamlined Printing Environment
From your day of setting-up a follow-me printing solution, the printing environment becomes a whole lot more flexible. As users are expected to be present at devices for jobs to be executed, there are never those queues at any one particular machine. If a printing device is processing other jobs, a user can simply move on to spot him/her self at an alternative device, which is why he or she is authorized.
Follow-me printing, as mentioned before, provides administrators with far greater controls. Policy and rules-based printing ensures print resources are protected from excessive use, according to an organization’s own pre-determined requirements. Many follow-me printing packages such as Ringdale even provide administrators by having an interface for programming their very own custom policies. In addition to providing the likelihood for typical savings of between 10% and 15%, follow-me printing enables organisations to take greater accountability of their environmental commitments. Not merely does cutting excess printing reduce an organization’s costs but obviously, through lower paper, ink and electricity usage, it also saves on energy and natural resources too.