About the Mopria Alliance
The Mopria Alliance is a non-profit membership organization of leading global technology companies with the shared goal of providing intuitively simple wireless printing from smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. The Mopria Alliance’s goal is to bring together the entire industry to drive selected standards adoption, support mobile software application providers to deploy print functionality in their applications, develop experience guidelines in the interaction of mobile and print devices, certify products which will carry the Mopria logo and educate consumers and business customers about the ability to easily print from mobile devices. The founding members of Mopria Alliance are Canon, HP, Samsung and Xerox, and includes software developers such as Adobe Document Products, Papyrus, and Diptic.
The Goals of Mopria
The mobile print alliance aims to simplify the mobile print user experience from mobile touch points such as smart phones and tablets and drive mobile print penetration. The group’s agenda includes steps to develop and promote mobile print standards, certify print solutions, and educate users. Other initiatives include embedding print in mobile apps, embedding print in the mobile OS, creating a standard print protocol and increased support for legacy devices, popularizing and incorporating NFC (near field communication), and increased shipment of Wi-Fi enabled or Wi-Fi direct print devices. Near field communication (NFC) is a set of standards for smart phones and similar devices to establish radio communication with each other by touching them together or bringing them into close proximity, usually no more than a few inches. By enabling NFC printing, users will find mobile printing a much easier user experience. NFC simplifies pairing of mobile device and printer and provides a secure convenient print workflow.
These initiatives will simplify the print experience and support print out of the box, eliminating app download along with minimal configuration. The figure below shows the roadmap to implement common standards for Mopria Alliance:
The benefits for end users includes simplified mobile print experience, embedded mobile print capability which precludes app download, business print solutions that work with BYOD environment and support for multiple connection workflows such as wireless networks, peer to peer networks, and NFC.
The benefits for new alliance members includes alliance tools, device certifications, broad compatibility of certified devices, consumer engagement and device usage driven by simplified mobile print user experience and unlocking of mobile print pages.
As per International Data Corporation’s (IDC) research, currently over 50% of US smart phone users do not know how to print from their devices. Transition of the majority to mobile print will require ease of use, simplicity, and opening of business IT controls. IDC forecast by 2015, 50 percent of smart phone users and 58 percent of tablet users will want to print. Additionally, IDC forecasts double digit US mobile print pages growth for the period 2012-2016. Steps such as common standards, embedded OS print functionality and simplified user experience will help drive the momentum for mobile pages.
IDC welcomes this initiative by leading hardcopy equipment manufacturers to simplify and streamline user print experience from mobile touch points such as smart phones and tablets. Mobile print users will benefit from common standards, certified products and interoperability across the print ecosystem. The print industry has taken the challenge to align, drive common standards across mobile devices, printer devices and mobile OS systems to meet the rapidly growing market need for mobile printing.
Joining the Alliance
There will be different membership levels designed to support the goals of the Mopria Alliance while ensuring successful ubiquitous deployment of the standards. Software application developers are a key target of the Alliance, and will be able to join the Mopria Alliance for free. They will need to accept the alliance’s license agreement to use its SDK and download the APIs. The Mopria standards will be available soon. Members of the Alliance will begin incorporating the standard in their products in the coming months. For companies interested in joining the Mopria Alliance, please contact the alliance at: www.mopria.org/membership.
