Mike Morper
Last week I spoke with Mike Morper, vice president of marketing for Notable Solutions, about the latest enhancements to NSi Mobile, its productivity app for organizations looking to extend business processes to their mobile workforces as well as NSi Output Manager, an integrated print management solution for office and enterprise environments that require a secure way to control the production and delivery of printed information.
The origins of Output Manager date back to earlier this year with NSi’s acquisition of Barr EOM (Enterprise Output Management) from Barr Systems. This product was designed exclusively for production print applications. Now that it’s been renamed Output Manager and is under the auspices of NSi it’s offered in three flavors to cater to different audiences—office, enterprise, and production.
“We didn’t jettison the primary business, production, we’re still playing there,” says Morper. “We wanted to take this technology and readdress how it can be best leveraged in the office.”
He expects Output Manager Enterprise to be the most popular of the three versions. Output Manager Enterprise does everything that Output Manager Office does, but also allows for printing to any networked device across the organization regardless of where the print submission originated.
“We are also providing the flexibility to connect into legacy or host systems like an ERP system where you need to get a print stream from it and deliver it to its destination,” states Morper. “We can have that print stream come in, interpret it, and transform it into something an office printer would recognize.”
Office Manager can also take a Unix print stream and convert it to a postscript or PDF stream for output in an office. Further functionality is provided through integration with NSi’s AutoStore, NSi’s secure information collection solution. As a result, Notable Solutions says it can dramatically improve the management of backend application print streams such as those coming from mainframes, Unix, Linux, AS/400, SAP, Peoplesoft, Epic, and others. Customers can incur significant savings by converting high-volume print jobs from a mainframe system and delivering them as an electronic file that is fully searchable.
There’s also a mobile component to Output Manager. “We’ve expanded the capabilities of our mobile platform to be able to provide print submission from our mobile client,” says Morper. “If you need to put something in a virtual queue you can do that from our mobile client without touching the printer itself.”
Something else unique about Output Manager is that NSi has developed its own universal print driver to meet the needs of mostly larger organizations that have an array of different devices from different manufacturers. This eliminates the need for that organization to make sure all those drivers for those devices are available on all the desktops in that organization. In a secure environment the organization would have to take each of those drivers through a security audit.
“Our universal Postscript print driver can be transparently used across a mixed fleet,” explains Morper.
This is done by sending pure Postscript to the Output Manager server where it identifies the device, recognizes the attributes of that device, and injects those attributes at print time. Then in real time it injects those traits into the print stream when it’s time to print.
“We can go to any device, Ricoh, Xerox, Konica Minolta, and still be able to accurately output to that device based on this cool technology we offer to our customers,” states Morper.
NSi is also providing a limited functionality license of Autostore at no extra charge with the Office and Enterprise offerings. This provides users with scan to e-mail and scan to folder.
NSi spent a significant amount of time looking at competitive offerings, and now believes it has something compelling on the print side at a more competitive price. “We’re bullish on what we’re bringing to market and excited about what we have to offer,” boasts Morper.
Asked what are the three most important things to remember about Output Manager, Morper says, the ability to provide secure print output in the office; it’s the only platform fully integrated with both print and capture so if an organization depends on MFPs, they will see a benefit from a single user experience at the MFP for both print and capture services; and that it contains a complete mobility overlay so NSi can accommodate the needs of an office bound workforce and print and capture support through its mobile client for a workforce on the go.
NSi Output Manager will be available in November.
Meet NSi Mobile 6.2
With the mobile revolution in full swing, Notable Solutions is well positioned for meeting the demands of the mobile worker with NSi Mobile 6.2.
A Notable Solutions press release describes NSi Mobile as “the first enterprise-grade solution to integrate both capture and print capabilities to help mobile workers deliver accurate information into their business process, regardless if the downstream destination is a line of business application or a print device.”
A key benefit of the latest version of NSi Mobile is that it is fully integrated with NSi’s Output Manager. Users can submit print jobs via smartphone or tablet into a virtual print queue. An individual either inside or outside the firewall can submit a print job on both iOS and Android devices without the need for third-party hosted servers. NSi Mobile ensures a secure and direct connection between each device and the virtual print queue.
“The print job can later be printed out at the printer of their choice [on the company network] when they finally get to where they’re going,” explains Morper.
Another notable capability, according to Morper, is the ability to securely browse documents stored in Microsoft SharePoint sites from within the NSi Mobile client and route them back into a business process from a mobile device, or for the mobile worker to securely print them from a mobile device.
Other new features in NSi Mobile include:
- eSignature Capabilities – NSi Mobile’s eSignature capabilities help organizations provide immediate consents for approving tasks and validating information. Users can add signatures using their fingers or a stylus
- Barcode Imaging – NSi Mobile’s barcode capabilities can be used to identify asset and business information and dynamically populate fields instantaneously with accurate data pulled from the company’s database.
- Geo-tagging Information – Users can validate progress, performance, and location history by including geo-location information with mobile documents and photographs. “We can geo-tag where the form is completed, which is good for fraud detection, and can populate latitude and longitude data as well as real-time lookup of addresses,” notes Morper.
NSi Mobile can also do a reverse lookup of an address and populate it in a form. Another new capability is being able to read barcode values into a form. For example, it’s able to read asset tags on capital equipment and connect that with information in database.
NSi Mobile 6.2 is available now from the Apple App Store as well as Google Play. The NSi Mobile server is available for download through the AutoStore Software Update service for customers using AutoStore 6 Service Pack 1 or greater. Additional client licenses for use with NSi Mobile are required.
