We’ll all be familiar with this moment before an essential meeting; you’re at the printer to get a print job but instead find yourself sifting through piles of paper trying to locate your document in amongst those of your colleagues and goodness knows what else. Or you’re in an alternative part of the office and you realise you’ve printed those papers you needed to the incorrect device… It could be surprising to know that both of the scenarios outlined here are entirely avoidable and with a straightforward follow-me printing solution, could quickly become a thing of the past. Follow-me,

centralised printing or ‘secure print’ because the technology can be referred to, ensures that documents are just ever printed when they are ‘requested’ or ‘pulled’ from certain device by an authorized user, so they are never left piling up unclaimed and could be collected from wherever is most convenient or quickest for that one user. Besides those individual user benefits, for any organisation, follow-me printing is really a straightforward solution to cut paper waste, spread printing burdens and improve document security. Here, we offer an introduction to the technology and an outline of some of follow-me printing’s main advantages…

Introduction

In most frequent printing environments without follow-me printing capabilities, users themselves decide wherever they would like to print a file while still at their workstation. Most will tend to select the closest operational printer and/or the one which prints in along with they require. But in offices where there are multiple devices in use, it’s quite simple to produce mistakes in regards to choosing where to send documents. A digit or a letter wrong on a drop-down printer menu and a file are at the incorrect printer on the other side of the building. Or possibly a user chooses the closest device which also is actually the most used; and so valuable time is spent at the printer while other users’ jobs are being executed. The standard system is pretty haphazard at the very best of times however in the worst light, it’s frequently slow, fairly inefficient and not at all times the absolute most cost-effective. Follow-me printing can address all these issues.

Follow-Me Printing

By staging and compartmentalising the printing process, follow-me printing can effectively eliminate the issues outlined above as well as the associated financial and time costs. Unlike conventional printing, where a user is networked right to a tool, follow-me printing deploys a print server among devices and users’ jobs. Where as ordinarily, when a user selects ‘print’ the work will begin to be processed instantly by a chosen device, follow-me printing first sends the work to a print server. It’s only once a user approaches certain device, which can 月曆印刷 be any device on the network for which that user has authorization that the work is ‘pulled’ from the server, where it’s been temporarily stored and executed, ‘on demand’, there and then. To pull employment (or jobs) from a tool, with regards to the hardware installed, users either type in someone ID code to spot themselves, or if your card reader has been installed on a tool, place their ID cards on the card sensor or swipe their cards, where there’s a magnetic reader installed.

Not in the specific scenarios outlined above, the numerous advantages of a follow-me printing system are as follows:

Enhanced Document Security

Among the major benefits of follow-me printing is the significantly higher levels of security it provides, in comparison to more conventional printing arrangements. Security is in fact one of the very frequently cited reasons for organisations making the transition to follow-me printing configurations.

As users are required to be at a tool due to their print job(s) to be processed, follow-me printing can practically eliminate the situation of lost printed documents. Furthermore, whether a user collects their job having an ID card or instead identifies him/herself with a PIN logon, the follow-me printing system can make sure that only the authorized user can pick-up the jobs which they’ve submitted. And as print jobs are not executed unless they are ‘pulled’ from a tool by a user, there’s far less danger of your more sensitive or especially important documents being seen by unauthorized individuals or being accidentally overly enthusiastic with another person’s printing.

Finally, nearly all the more commonly-used follow-me printing solutions provide a high level of data Encryption to ensure that documents remain completely secure while they are in digital form. This ensures that when your printer network becomes victim of an unauthorized attack, all jobs on the print server remain safe and secure.

Greater Accountability

Besides the most obvious cost savings which come from eliminating those unnecessary print jobs which remain unclaimed on a tool, a follow-me printing solution provides organisations with the powers to introduce much higher levels of user accountability. As all print jobs pass through the follow-me print server and always remain connected to certain user ID, follow-me printing provides administrators with highly centralised management control and the capacity to assign costs per user, by cost centre, department, project or by a specific cost code or printer. By budgeting your printing with such means, if there’s a specific department or even someone inside an organization regularly exceeding print budgets, this is redressed immediately upon installing a follow-me printing solution.

A More Streamlined Printing Environment

From the afternoon of setting-up a follow-me printing solution, the printing environment becomes far more flexible. As users are required to be present at devices for jobs to be executed, there are never those queues at any one particular machine. If a publishing device is processing other jobs, a user can simply move on to spot him/her self at an alternate device, for which he or she’s authorized.

Follow-me printing, as mentioned before, provides administrators with far greater controls. Policy and rules-based printing ensures print resources are protected from excessive use, in accordance with an organization’s own pre-determined requirements. Many follow-me printing packages such as Ringdale even provide administrators by having an interface for programming their own custom policies. As well as providing the likelihood for typical savings of between 10% and 15%, follow-me printing enables organisations to take greater accountability of these environmental commitments. Not just does cutting excess printing reduce an organization’s costs but obviously, through lower paper, ink and electricity usage, in addition, it saves on energy and natural resources too.