As the workforce becomes increasingly mobile, so does technology. That’s true whether you’re talking hardware or software, and nowhere is that more evident of late than in the world of office technology. Hardware manufacturers are releasing apps that enable printing from anywhere anytime and software companies are rolling out programs that allow mobile workers to print from their mobile devices.

One software solution of note is Drivve Print, a print management program encompassing various modules, including pull printing, device authentication, cost recovery, and usage reporting. Mobility Manager was the first Drivve Print module released in late 2011; the other modules will be available from August 2012 onwards.

The Drivve Print Mobility Manager module is a driverless print solution designed for users of mobile devices such as smartphones, iPads, tablet computers, and laptops. Users can print to any printer or MFP from any location via the Internet, or over a WiFi connection. Unlike other mobile printing solutions, Drivve Print is specifically designed for businesses and organizations who want to provide their staff and visitors with the ability to print from their mobile devices while also providing them with important capabilities such as security, control, and usage tracking.

According to Peter Turnbull, executive vice president of sales & marketing for Drivve, Drivve Print has predominantly taken off within the education, financial services, and professional services markets, even though it is a good fit for virtually any business or organization where staff and visitors need to print from their mobile devices.

Drivve Print doesn’t require users to be on the same network or to load printer drivers. Users can submit jobs three different ways—by e-mail, uploading them to the Web, or from their smartphone or tablet computer via the Drivve Print app. Documents can then be printed securely at any specific printer or MFP, held in a personal queue until released by the user at a print device, or routed into an existing print management or cost recovery solution for secure release at any connected printer or MFP.

“Drivve Print is licensed by print device, not users, so it’s extremely affordable to bundle it with any print device sold by a dealer,” explains Turbull. “This mobile print product helps our resellers increase equipment sales through differentiation in the marketplace. Our strategy is to help our resellers lock customers in from their competition with simple, entry-level functionality that delivers a quick ROI. Once they have seeded that customer, the have the full breadth and depth of our product line at their disposal to up-sell and cross-sell solutions and, in doing so, develop stronger, long terms relationship between lease renewals.”

For example, if a guest comes to your office and needs to print a document they can e-mail any one of more than 500 file formats supported to a specified e-mail address. The guest can choose to have the document print right away and receive a PIN back via e-mail to securely release the job or it can be held in a personal print queue for secure release at the print device. Users can also submit jobs via a Web upload, so for instance students in an educational environment can upload a document no matter where they are on campus and print it out at a device they have access to.

The other print option is via an app and Drivve offers apps for all the major smartphones and tablets. “It’s all about the Apps. That’s where we’re seeing the biggest amount of interest,” says Turnbull. “Users like the idea that they call send a document to be printed by e-mail, but they love our print apps because they offer so much more functionality and productivity enhancements for mobile workers.”

It is not easy to print from smartphones or tablet computers. They are electronic devices and the designers didn’t consider building in the ability to output documents and content to yesterday’s technology, namely paper. So Drivve has spent a long time refining its mobile print software not only to allow users to print quickly and easily, but also to give the valu- add features, such as personal print queues and QR-code-based print device recognition.

“We’ve incorporated some high-end technology that allows users to interact with their cell phones as they would the MFP control panel,” states Turnbull. “So now with Drivve Print users can select and release documents to be printed at any printer or MFP. What this means in practice is that after the user has sent the document they want printed to their own personal queue, they can select the device they want to print it at by either navigating their way to it and selecting it on their print app, or they simply use the QR-code scan feature to automatically select the print device.”

He adds that what’s important for Drivve’s channel to understand is that the introduction of mobile devices is taking away print clicks, potentially forever.

“Since users find it hard to print from these devices, they don’t,” says Turnbull. “So after a while they just get into the habit of not printing. These clicks are lost to our channel forever.”

He continues, “It is vitally important for us all to make mobile printing as easy and as simple as possible and to encourage people to print from their mobile devices. Let’s face it, printing is a transient technology, it has only been about a hundreds of years, however, we as an industry need to make sure that it continues for a few more years at least!”

A key differentiator for Drivve Print is that it’s print device agnostic. “Some of our competitors can only print to specific hardware,” explains Turnbull. “Drivve Print on the other hand allows users to print to any network printer or MFP. So for dual-line or multi-line equipment dealers, Drivve Print offers a single solution for all. Even for single-line dealers, Drivve Print allows the to deploy mobile printing across competitor equipment and capture more clicks that way.”

Drivve’s primary distribution channel is the office equipment dealer, however it is now gaining significant interest from mainstream VARs. Through integration to the embedded MFP platforms of vendors such as Toshiba, Sharp, Xerox, Samsung, and Kyocera, Drivve offers an even stronger proposition and richer, more productive user experience, according to Turnbull.

“That’s one of the two main [mobile print] products we go to market with,” adds Tony Venice, manager of strategic product management for Toshiba. “You basically send an e-mail to a device, it’s hardware agnostic, and can print to any printer. You assign an e-mail address to a printer or MFP, and you send an attachment or using the app itself which makes available any of the registered devices to print to.”

Another OEM who has seen the potential in Drivve is Sharp. At the recent Sharp dealer meeting Drivve demonstrated its image capture and workflow, document management, mobile printing, and fax solutions for Sharp OSA (Open System Architecture)-enabled devices. Drivve was one of the first developers of apps for the Sharp OSA platform. With the newest iteration of OSA and Drivve technology, users can scan and store document images in the cloud via Drivve Image and Drivve DM. Additionally, print mobile users can print just about any document format from a smartphone or tablet to Sharp MFPs.

Mobility Manager System Requirements include a Windows 2003 or 2008 server, a minimum of 1GB of RAM (4GB recommended), Intel Xeon server processor or equivalent, and 5GB of disk space.

Besides Drivve Print, the company’s other products include:

Drivve Image – scanning software that organizations to streamline and automate business processes that require paper documents to digitized, and / or data to be extracted from both paper and electronic documents for further processing or storage;
Drivve | DM – a browser-based document management and workflow system that is available as an on-premise solution or a Cloud based service, with apps for smartphones and iPads.
Drivve Fax – a Cloud based inbound and out-bound fax service that can be accessed from the MFP control panel.

Mobility and the Cloud are have been core to Drivve’s business strategy from the outset. The focus is not only to deliver component technology via the Cloud, but to offer end-to-end document centric business solutions and services.

“That’s really the direction we’re going in”, notes Turnbull. “The ability to access your documents, your workflows, to manage and approve the business processes regardless of your location or computing device is at the heart of our business strategy.”

“The difficulty we’ve seen with cloud solutions is not adoptability at the consumer level, but adoptability from a business perspective with our resellers”, continues Turnbull. “They don’t have a way to fund and recognize the revenue from cloud-based solutions. It’s not a traditional lease where you can do a fair market value (FMV) and purchase the software up front and get funding for it. Businesses have been challenged to learn a new compensation model related to reoccurring revenue which is not the traditional upfront payment and funding for the software.”

The company’s entire product line can be purchased through the Cloud. “We’re not trying to solve the industry’s problem on figuring out how to fund cloud, we’re just trying to work with partners through our various channels that have to be funded up front or work with existing compensation models or with our resellers to figure out better compensation models for their sales reps,” states Turnbull.

The big issue in her mind is that the industry is still box oriented and focused on 30-day sales cycles. “They want to sell the MFP or printer, push them out on the marketplace, and then get funded up front,” Turnbull continues. “We’re trying to teach our resellers if you have a solutions-oriented sales force and they go out and sell solutions they’ll have a better up sell opportunity, they’ll have better control over their accounts, and then up-sell them on a go forward basis with the reoccurring revenue that needs to grow to sell them residual commissions off of it, which also solves the problem of high turnover in our industry.”

Drivve Print is licensed by print device and includes first year maintenance and support, so there is no charge for its print apps. At press time Drivve, the software developer, is offering significant discounts on its mobile printing product to its resellers. “This can really seed a new customer base and is allowing resellers the affordability to bundle Mobility Manager with every device that goes out the door,” says Turnbull.

What’s next for Drivve?

“Educating our channel,” responds Turnbull. “We are looking for our resellers to deliver quality solutions. We have a partner program called, Open Highway. This allows us to onboard resellers in pre-defined stages – prelaunch, launch, and post launch – in a way that educates them and prepares them to prospect, sell, install and configure, as well as support software solutions.”

Drivve also recently launched an eLearning portal called Drivve Academy, which offers an extensive series of self paced videos and certification for both sales and technical professionals.

On the product side the company is preparing to release additional Drivve Print modules—the aforementioned user authentication, cost recovery, and rules based printing.

Drivve Print Mobility Manager at a Glance

Mobility Manager is a module of Drivve Print that offers a driverless print solution for users of mobile devices. It allows users of any mobile device, such as a smartphones, laptops or tablet computers to print seamlessly and easily to any print device on a network.

Key features include:

Can print to any network printer or MFP
Supports over 500 file formats, including PDF and MS Office
Submit documents by e-mail, Intuitive Web user interface or Apps
Drivve | Print apps for smartphones and tablet computers
LDAP synchronization for user management
Release jobs at any print device with print apps as well as QR-codes
Connectors to third-party print management/cost recovery solutions, including Equitrac, PaperCut, Pharo, SafeCom, Ubiquitech VDMS, Pcounter, Print Audit and more