Can Mobile and BYOD Printing Be Both Simple AND Secure?

Posted by Jarrett Taylor

Today nearly half of the workforce identifies as “mobile,” meaning they work from more than one corporate office. We all know that printer installation and management can be a headache even for employees who primarily stay in one office—but for mobile employees, the challenges are exponential. At each new office they visit they need to contact IT in order to print, which is frustrating to both the employee and the IT help desk alike.

There’s also the issue of enabling simple, secure printing for BYOD users and guests. You need to enable all employees to easily print from both corporate-owned devices and their personal devices. And you need your contractors, partners and guests to be able to easily and securely print from whichever office they happen to be working from, too. But you also need to retain the ability to control what and how each of these parties print.

Here at PrinterLogic, our mantra has always been to Eliminate Print Servers. And while at first that may seem like a statement that would only matter to IT pros, I’m here to tell you about the myriad of benefits that Eliminating Print Servers has for the end user, too. And today, we’ll be focusing on our newest product, which dramatically simplifies life for your mobile employees, as well as BYOD and guest printing situations.

To help solve the printing problems of your mobile workers, BYOD and guests, today we introduced the PrinterLogic Mobile Printing solution, which extends the capabilities of our existing printer management platform. Our Mobile Printing solution gives organizations of all sizes the ability to enable any mobile employee, contractor, partner or guest to easily print to the closest printer, without the installation of any printers or the need for print servers. With this new product, PrinterLogic has enabled enterprises to empower users to print from every device in their print environment—both personal and corporate-owned—regardless of whether they are on or off the network.

So let’s take a look at how it works.

Making Life Easier for Mobile Employees
PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing solution enables your mobile employees to print natively from their mobile devices by simply hitting the forward arrow, then print, and then selecting a PrinterLogic printer as their print option. Benefits for the mobile employee include:

  • No software to install—Mobile employees no longer need to call IT for help installing the printers at each new location they visit.
  • Any device—PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing solution supports all mobile devices, making mobile printing simple regardless of which device type your employees use.
  • Any printer—PrinterLogic enables users to quickly and easily print from their mobile devices to any network printer, regardless of that printer’s mobile capabilities.

Making Life Easier for BYOD, Partners and Guests
BYOD users, partners and guests traditionally encounter a number of difficulties when trying to print from enterprise offices. Getting authorization to print and installing printers is often a non-starter, and is difficult for both the user and IT. PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing solution enables BYOD users, partners and guests to easily print from any device, via simple email-to-print functionality regardless of whether they are on- or off-network. These users simply walk to a printer, enter its dedicated email address, email documents to that printer where it is immediately printed.

Making Life Easier on IT
Enterprise IT departments spend a large portion of their time dealing with print-related requests that stem from challenges around BYOD & guest printing. PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing solution simplifies printing for those users, which drastically reduces the number of print-related service desk calls IT receives. In addition, PrinterLogic provides a number of added benefits for IT, including:

  • Built-in security—PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing solution gives the enterprise complete control over who can print and to which printers.
  • Retain control—For email print jobs, enterprises can set quotas for how much guests can print, the file types they can print, limit printing to black and white only, and more.
  • Supports any printer—PrinterLogic enables mobile printing while eliminating the cost of upgrading all your printers to iOS and Google Cloud Print capable devices. All printers gain mobile printing capabilities, even legacy printers without support of native email printing.
  • Printer-specific release—PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing solution gives employees the ability to automatically release a print job to a specific printer from their mobile device.

But Wait, There’s More…
In addition to solving the challenges of mobile, BYOD and guest printing, PrinterLogic’s latest release also provides enterprises with several new capabilities. This includes broader platform support, additional security features, and management tools.

  • Android & Chromebook—Support for both Android and Chromebook devices enables enterprises to truly support any device in their print environment.
  • Linux Client—A new Linux client enables seamless printing for thick & thin client endpoint devices while eliminating the need for costly printer mapping and management tools.
  • SNMP-Based Alerts—Proactive alerts can now notify IT of printer issues so that they can fix issues before users complain, enhancing the user experience and ensuring a higher level of availability.
  • Pull Printing—Pull Printing increases the security of enterprise print environments by securely storing users’ print jobs until the user releases the job at the printer. By using PrinterLogic’s Pull Printing and Mobile Printing solutions together, enterprises are empowered with secure mobile printing.

So if you’ve been looking for a way to enable simple printing for both your mobile employees, BYOD and guests—regardless of their device type and whether they are on or off network—and still want to maintain the security and control of your print environment, PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing solution may be your answer. We’d be happy to give you a demo, or set you up with a free trial of PrinterLogic’s complete platform, so that you can see if it’s right for your organization. Just get in touch with us here.