Is BYOD a disruptive phenomenon or a business and work enabler?
With smartphones, tablets, and laptops making their way into your organization or campus, allowing users to connect to your network, find their files, and print can cause operational challenges.
According to Gartner , BYOD forces IT to wrestle with governance and compliance, mobile device management, and security of your network.
Keep your documents secure
Your users expect to be connected wherever they are; working from home, delivering an assignment, or just in between buildings. What’s the easiest way to manage their printing and still track and control what is being printed and where?
Jon Witts, Director of Digital Strategy, Queen Margaret’s School UK:
“Normally this would be a no-go area – ensuring the compatibility of devices with your printers and installing drivers, or asking users to install drivers to access the printers would be an administrative nightmare.”
We know all devices have a web browser, so PaperCut’s Web Print could just be the answer you’re looking for.
“We rolled out Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) for staff and students, using PaperCut as a secure method of printing along with Web Print for easy accessibility and convenience.
“There was no need to do a hard sell for students to adopt the new Web Print workflows. The service improvement with more access to printers and less down time from printer errors, far outweighed the changes in workflow that came with a ‘new system’.” said Jon.
An easy way to allow BYOD printing
PaperCut’s Web Print enables printing from user-owned devices without the overhead of installing client software, printer drivers, and managing server authentication. Users print by simply uploading documents with a standard web browser. Deployed across thousands of organizations, it’s an ideal solution for print services via BYOD.
With Web Print, users are authenticated when they log in to the PaperCut NG or PaperCut MF User web interface. Any documents they upload can then be tracked against their user name. Users have access to features set up by IT, including access to shared accounts.
“Web printing makes it super easy for students to print from anywhere on campus and from their own mobile devices, along with the ability to easily charge students for printing costs outside of the classroom and recoup some of the money spent on printing supplies. Not only has PaperCut allowed us to save money, it has genuinely made an aspect of the IT department’s job exceedingly easy and less troublesome on a daily basis!” said Matt, IT Manager at Steele Canyon High School USA.
Print anywhere, anytime
Many SysAdmins have come to us with interesting stories of how Web Print has been working hard overnight processing 100’s of jobs from students printing in their dorms, all while the SysAdmins are fast asleep (but actually wide awake playing Pokemon Go). With that in mind, we’re continuously improving the robustness of Web Print.
Version 15 of PaperCut NG and PaperCut MF saw enhancements to include common picture formats such as jpg, tif, gif, and png, in addition to Microsoft Office files and PDFs. PaperCut’s Web Print feature just works, straight out of the box with minimal setup for IT. Users can upload multiple files simultaneously with ‘drag and drop’ to get their files to print with ease. Version 16.2 is around the corner, and will include Web Print Scaling to remove bottlenecks and improve reliability particularly in larger organizations such as universities where students use Web Printing.
Find out more on PaperCut Web Print , or deep dive into configuration .
Got a Web Print idea to share? Comment below or if want to share how you use it, tell us your story .
