On Tuesday, June 12, 2012 EFI announced the release of PrintMe Mobile 2.2 software, the latest version of their mobile printing software. The new version gives IT departments the ability to better control and manage printing from tablets and smartphones in the enterprise. PrintMe Mobile’s new capabilities also enable leading job accounting applications, including Equitrac and PaperCut to track printing from smartphones and tablets. A full version of PrintMe Mobile 2.2 software is available for download and a free 45-day trial.
PrintMe Mobile has a short history with EFI shipping some version of the product since early 2011. It started as an option for devices using EFI’s Fiery controllers before evolving to any printer. EFI is already in the fourth version of the product.
EFI touts PrintMe Mobile as the only enterprise software that enables direct Wi-Fi printing from iPads, iPhones and Android devices, from within the application they are using, to any existing network printer regardless of brand. Users enjoy the ease of simply selecting print within their application and printing to the printers that automatically populate in a drop down menu. Developed for the enterprise, PrintMe Mobile works across multiple subnets, is scalable to thousands of users, and provides powerful management and job reporting capabilities for IT administrators. The software is simple to use, manage, and deploy, often installing in less than 20 minutes. (view demo here.)
Tom Offutt
With PrintMe Mobile 2.2, IT departments can account for printing originating from mobile devices and implement policies to control access to printers based on a user ID. EFI has added advanced user authentication to enable integration with a corporate LDAP server. Users must provide their network credentials before they print. “We’re building on top of the basic Apple print protocol but adapting it to a corporate environment,” notes Tom Offutt, director of business development for EFI.
Asked if this would become cumbersome for the average user every time they wanted to print, Offutt says not at all since they only have to provide those credentials one time per vendor or printer. “This allows us to do a better job of tracking print jobs and allows us to integrate with on the job accounting software such as Equitrac and PaperCut which is typically user based on print queues.
IT departments can also use PrintMe Mobile to create and enforce policies to control which printers can be used and what types of printing options are available (black/white or color, stapling, advanced finishing, etc.) for each specific user or groups of users.
For organizations that allow employees to use their own mobile devices at work and issue that frequently crops up is that they can’t log onto the company network unless it’s a corporate owned and controlled device. “But they still want the employees to print, so the problem then becomes the employee is logged onto a network beyond the firewall, the problem is the printers are sitting behind the firewall so there is no way to see the printer or print to it,” explains Offutt.
“We’ve come up with an appliance that can sit beyond the firewall and make a secure connection with the PrintMe Mobile server and capture wireless print jobs and deliver them through a secured connection through PrintMe Mobile to whatever printers are selected.”
Now users outside the firewall or guests or employees on an unsecured Wi-Fi network can still print on a company network. “That’s something a lot of people are asking us for,” reveals Offutt.
He adds that these enhancements have added another level of control and security for the IT organization to fine tune how the product is installed in their environment.
Security printing is another key benefit of the new software. Users can send print jobs to an internal print queue and release the print using their mobile device once they are standing at a printer.
As far as end user feedback for the latest version, one of the things EFI heard from Fortune 500 customers was that they wanted additional security around mobile printing. When a print job is sent from an Apple device it’s anonymous, no user info about that job whatsoever. “That doesn’t fly in the corporate world,” says Offutt. “When you send [a print job] from a PC or Mac there’s a user name associated with it or at least you know where it’s coming from.”
The new version also includes integration with EFI’s private cloud printing service. Certain verticals, such as law firms or healthcare facilities expressed concerns about sending information into EFI’s public crowd. To allay those fears they’ve added a private cloud printing service where the document stays on the local network and is stored in an encrypted format until it is retrieved by the user.
Timing is everything and EFI remains in a good place with PrintMe Mobile. “Mobile printing is still very much an emerging market space,” says Offutt.
What’s interesting is that Offutt believes that mobile printing is being driven by tablets and not phones. “We’ve had smartphones for the past five years and apparently nobody cares about printing from them,” says Offutt. “It hasn’t driven any huge demand. Maybe it’s user expectations, you don’t expect to print from your phone.”
Given that premise then printing from a tablet makes perfect sense even though up until now that hasn’t been possible in a brand agnostic way. Plus user expectations what they are, and when one considers the view many users have as the tablet as a substitute for their laptop and given the screen size, “they expect it to work like their laptop or desktop, but it doesn’t,” states Offutt. “As soon as I’m away from my desk and want to print something, I can’t. As soon as companies start distributing tablets or using tablets, they wonder how do I print from this and that’s usually when they give us a call.”
Offutt tells us that PrintMe Mobile is the only product on the marketplace today that integrates with that iOS AirPrint capability to send a mobile print job to an existing network printer, allowing companies to capture additional mobile print. “From the standpoint of the printer manufacturer or dealer it makes sure you don’t lose that mobile print job to a one-off desktop AirPrint compatible printer,” says Offutt. “You can hopefully direct that output to the MFPs which have the lowest cost per page for the company. That’s what Print Mobile is designed to do and that’s our most requested feature.”
Apparently more users want to print via AirPrint but don’t want to go out and buy 500 new desktop printers and pay 20 cents a page to print. “There is no other solution on the market today that does that,” states Offutt. “If there’s some dream world environment where you only have one brand of printer, you can probably come up with a solution to do that, but in the real world there’s usually more than one brand of printer. In that case PrintMe Mobile is the only solution out there that’s brand agnostic.”
This latest version of PrintMe Mobile will also be a boon for organizations providing managed print services. “It’s expanding the managed print environment to make sure the mobile print jobs are on the same footing as the network print jobs,” states Offutt. “You envision it in a managed print environment where you take over responsibility for a fleet of printers. You can now control which printers you are now managing. It’s a way to bring value to an existing managed print services agreement.”
Existing PrintMe Mobile customers are automatically upgraded to the new version at no additional cost.
“This product is designed to fit in a corporate environment and needs a minimum set of controls that an IT organization has been asking us for so mobile print is on the same footing on network printing so they have the same ability to enable it,” says Offutt. “Now it’s much more granular and can be fine tuned to what users can be given the ability to do mobile printing.”
Asked what his expectations are in the next 6-10 months for PrintMe Mobile with this new release, Offutt concludes “We’ll be able to point specifically to some very large accounts that have implemented it.”
Based on the past history of the product and the way the market has embraced it, you can bet on that happening.
