EFI's Tom Offutt: Why printing from your iPad or Android tablet isn't as simple as it should bePrinting from a tablet in an enterprise environment isn't incredibly straightforward. Digital print solutions company EFI explains why. If you've ever tried to connect your tablet to a network printer either at work or in your home, chances are that you probably already realize that it's not a very intuitive or straightfoward process. The exception is the emerging class of AirPrint-compatible printers, but these are built more for the personal needs of home usage than the multi-faceted demands of an enterprise environment. To gain a little more insight into the problem as well as potential solutions, we spoke with Tom Offutt, director of business development at EFI. In November, this Silicon Valley digital print solutions company released PrintMe Mobile, an enterprise-oriented printing solution that allows direct printing from a tablet via a network connection as well as via email. TabTimes: Why is it so hard to print from a tablet or other mobile device? We've tried to hook up both iPad and Honeycomb devices to network printers and were surprised at how laborious a process this is. Over time, tens of thousands of print drivers have been created, most unique to a specific operating system. When mobile operating systems were first developed, the hardware was – relative to today – very primitive. The CPU processing power required to run the print driver conversion process was high and printing was deemed to be a low priority task. Therefore most developers did not include the ability to print in their mobile operating system. This meant that printer manufacturers did not develop printer drivers for these operating systems. So getting print data to a printer from a mobile device had to be handled in a different way – off the device, on a server or PC somewhere, or later in the cloud. Even though the mobile device processing power is significantly greater today, native print functionality is still missing from most all mobile devices except those from Apple. But that doesn’t mean that mobile users do not want to print…it’s just that they can’t print. What are some of the trends that are driving the need for mobile printing? With tablets, printing feels less like less of a priority. The biggest trend pushing this is the growth of tablet/smartphone adoption. Gartner predicts that by 2013, 80% of businesses will support a workforce using tablets. More people are taking these to work with certain expectations. One expectation in particular is to be able to print from these devices. While some surveys say that tablets are potentially a reason not to print—larger display, greener, etc., there’s also the opposite view that there will always be a need for printing some types of documents. Some tasks like detailed document review are often easier and more efficient in hard copy. If you work on a desktop or laptop and are used to having hard copy, you are expecting that same experience from your tablet, but that’s not possible today within a company. In some industries, such as healthcare and legal, the ability to print is absolutely crucial and necessary to support their workflows and business processes. To the extent we can enable that, they will be able to use their mobile devices for these tasks and print the needed output. So when you need to be able to print, you really need to be able to print. Do you have any telemetry or usage data from your PrintMe products that can give me some insight into tablet printers’ behaviors? What are they printing? How often are they printing relative to desktop users? From our more than 10 years of providing public cloud printing services to business travelers and students, we know that PDF and Microsoft Word documents are among the most popular files types being printed from laptops and mobile devices outside of the office, but this is may not be a true picture of mobile printing inside the enterprise. There is no practical limit to the number of printers that can be attached to a given instance of PrintMe Mobile. There is no charge per user or no charge per pages printed, only a one-time fee for each printer. For Apple iOS devices (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch), users engage the operating system’s native print function – a user hits “print” and a list of supported printers is presented to the user. For Android and (soon) Blackberry devices, EFI offers a PrintMe Mobile app to print using the “Share” command or similar menu functions. With the Email to Print feature, users send a file via e-mail to the desired printer’s unique e-mail address, as configured in the PrintMe Mobile server software. This eliminates the need to have a printer that supports an embedded e-mail print capability; any printer that offers a Windows print driver is supported. With the Release to Print feature, the user sends a file via to a secure PrintMe e-mail address or uploads the document via the web, and the print job is held until the user releases the job at the printer, using a release code sent from the user’s mobile device. EFI PrintMe Mobile supports the use of QR codes to quickly identify supported printers and easily release held documents from a mobile device. We agree that there are a lot of apps that might be appropriate for a business with one, maybe two printers of the same make and model in a business, or in someone’s home or office. That is not the problem we are trying to solve. We built EFI PrintMe Mobile to solve the mobile printing problem for businesses with many, many mobile users and tens or hundreds of printers across multiple locations. The complexity and configuration requirements of consumer Apps simply won’t work in medium and large organizations. So in the markets we are serving with PrintMe Mobile, we do not expect that the App-centric approach will work. Editor's note: EFI's suggested retail price for a onetime perpetual license for unlimited use and users for a single printer is $500. A free 90-day trial can be downloaded at www./printmemobile. |
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