There’s a few key trends taking place in the office technology space today and one of the most prominent is mobile printing. It’s the wave of the future although it’s drawing plenty of interest here in the present. Hardware and software manufacturers are taking this trend seriously whether it’s adding mobile capability to their devices or making it a component of the software. A perfect example is uniFLOW, an integrated software solution that facilitates intelligent control and analysis of printing and copying functions. The software was originally developed by a German company, NT-ware, and is available via Canon channels in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and various Southeast Asian and Asian countries.
Canon’s history with uniFLOW goes back nearly a decade when Canon Europe first partnered with NT-ware. Over time Canon has made significant equity investments in NT-ware and now owns about three quarters of the company. uniFLOW technology made its way to the U.S. about 3-4 years ago.
NT-ware was founded in 1998 with a mission to develop and support the best IT platform for managing printing, scanning, and copying in corporations and print rooms. No wonder Canon and NT-ware are a good match. As NT-ware notes on its Website, “We are inventing new and better ways to help companies get maximum value from their multifunction devices by helping them manage their printing costs, improve their office worker productivity through document process automation and increase their document security.”
One way they’re doing that is with the latest version of uniFLOW introduced this past January, uniFLOW v5.1, which they describe as the only print and scan management system in the market with completely integrated mobile print capabilities. uniFLOW is an on-premise, server-based application. With uniFLOW software individuals can print directly from their mobile devices and control the release of their jobs through that mobile device. All of this is enabled as part of a company’s managed print infrastructure while allowing them to retain full cost control, print, and network security.
What’s intriguing about uniFLOW v5.1 is that it allows users to submit jobs in several ways, including e-mail, uploading a job via a Web browser, and printing directly from an application using an Internet-enabled driver. For iPhone and iPad users, uniFLOW supports direct printing from those devices as well. There is a uniFLOW native app for Apple iOS devices such as the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. The app enables the mobile device to identify the printer by a QR (Quick Response) code, select a print job from the user’s personal print queue, make the appropriate print settings, and release the job.
Mobile jobs can also be released from any uniFLOW-controlled printer by card access or pin code. The mobile device itself can also be used to control the release of the print jobs at the device. Via the uniFLOW mobile Web browser page users can identify themselves, select a printer, and then select which jobs to release.
Canon’s Mobile World
Canon is no stranger to mobility in what’s becoming an increasingly mobile world. The company has several initiatives focused on mobility—some are cloud based and some are not. “Obviously we recognize there’s a shift occurring in terms of the modality of print,” says Dennis Amorosano, director and general manager, Software Product Marketing & Solutions Business Development Division, Canon U.S.A, Inc. “We want to ensure our customers have the ability to access output regardless of the modality they happen to use whether it’s a traditional desktop or printing from a smart phone or tablet. With that in mind we’ve taken a multi-faceted approach in this area.”
For example, Canon has its own cloud platform and a number of technologies in the cloud that facilitate output from mobile users, including a Google Docs application and a Microsoft SharePoint online application from the device operating panel they can retrieve jobs from their Google Docs account for example, at the device. Or they can scan to their SharePoint or Google Docs account if they prefer.
Canon’s other cloud solution around mobility is a forms and printing application for Salesforce.com users. “One of the challenges many of Salesforce.com users have is that when they built [their software] they really didn’t build it with printing in mind,” explains Amorosano. “It’s like printing from a normal Website and as you know from the experience you have most Websites don’t allow you to print anything that’s all that elegant in terms of output.”
Canon and Salesforce.com have teamed up and from the Canon cloud, Canon has the ability to reach into a user’s salesforce.com account and pull out the data they want to print and deposit that data into a predesigned form that Canon has built for that particular client. The end user can elect to print on a Canon device and deliver it to a non-Canon device if they choose. According to Amorosano Salesforce.com technology is ideally suited for mobile users using Sales Force and any sales organization who wants to print information such as custom-configured quotes or proposals or sales dashboards.
With Canon’s connection to uniFLOW and its new mobile print capabilities, Canon’s mobile footprint has become much bigger. Although it’s not currently a cloud-based technology, Amorosano predicts that at some point in the future it will be. “In many cases customers who are using uniFLOW for cost control management capabilities in their environments are now looking to enable the mobile print functionality in the software. uniFLOW is modular and the way it’s designed there’s a host of different ways an end user can release print jobs to Canon and non-Canon engines using the mobile print capabilities in uniFLOW.”
The market for a uniFLOW solution is pretty much everybody and anybody because it can be easily scaled to the organization using it. “It has the ability to be implemented in a workgroup setting even if you have a limited number of users and devices,” says Amorosano. “In our experience the majority of placements are in midsize and large enterprise environments. In fact over half of all placements are in that area. Given the fact you can scale it, it can be delivered at a fairly reasonable cost.”
The ultimate benefit of uniFLOW for the end user is that rather than having three or four different software technologies to accommodate cost accounting needs, scan requirements, and secure print, it’s all available in one integrated package. “If you look at uniFLOW today not only does it support cost accounting, user job management and secure printing, we’ve also added mobile print,” says Amorosano. “If I’m a customer looking to take a holistic approach to managing the document processes and output and the costs associated with those things, we no longer need to cobble together multiple applications from different vendors to do that. That’s the most immediate thing that’s happening and we’re just now starting to see those modules implemented by customers in the marketplace.”
Amorosano points out the application provides advantages when used in combination with Canon engines. “The software is across platform and supports non-Canon devices in cases where customers may happen to be using something from a competitor.”
Since becoming a major equity investor Canon Europe has provided NT-ware with a tremendous amount of input and development direction. “As we do with any product we sell, and it’s true whether Canon technology or third-party technology we market,” says Amorosano. “We have a well-established process in the U.S. for capturing customer feedback and putting that back into our product planning and R&D and that’s pretty much the same with uniFLOW. A lot of the functions and capabilities you see in the product today have been influenced by us in the U.S.”
Loffler Companies, a Canon dealership based in Bloomington, MN is seeing a strong push from its customers for mobile printing even though there’s a lot to educate them about. “We’ve discovered a lot of IT organizations do not understand mobile printing,” says Jeff King, director of consulting services for Loffler. “They don’t understand how to deploy it or how it works. Many IT organizations are trying to get a head start on that.”
uniFLOW v5.1 and its mobile print capability is giving Loffler’s customers an opportunity to wrap their arms around mobile print and enables Loffler to stand out from its competitors by having this solution in their solutions arsenal.
What Loffler customers like about uniFLOW is the combination of follow-me printing, secure printing, mobility, and scanning workflow. Those four pieces tied together in a single unified platform make for a great presentation to the customer. “They no longer have to worry about four disparate applications to accomplish a particular task,” says King. “What uniFLOW does is offers a single platform to be able to drive what we identified as those major strategies.”
While uniFLOW today is strictly an on-premise solution, there’s no question that it will eventually migrate into the cloud.
“Customers will ultimately have the option to choose between server technology inside their environment or subscribe to uniFLOW capabilities that are resident in some sort of cloud platform,” concludes Amorosano.
