User printing onsite - multi-site with no WAN connection

Typically the types of customers that run in these environments range from expanding medium-sized businesses taking up multiple offices, to larger organizations. Often they are in the retail sector, where they have multiple stores across a large geographical area.

It’s common for these businesses to have a head office and remote sites. To service the needs of the head offices, they might run a dedicated server environment and business-class internet. The remote sites tend to run only a small subset of machines and usually a handful of printers.

Often with these setups, the companies are heavily invested in SaaS solutions to allow the remote sites to work with only an Internet connection. This makes a SaaS print management solution (in our case PaperCut Pocket or PaperCut Hive) a perfect fit because there are no dedicated print servers, there’s no capex outlay, and no complicated software configuration.

Typical customers with this style setup include:

• retail stores
• expanding small businesses

When it comes to configuring PaperCut Hive and Pocket in these environments, it tends to be quite a simple procedure depending on the options you want to use.

Recommended solution

In these types of environments, treat each site as a different Edge Mesh. This means jobs will only replicate internally using the machines at the site the user is initiating the print job from.

Therefore, from a PaperCut Hive and Pocket setup perspective, configure each site based on its network setup. See one of the following:

• For simple internet-only sites, see User printing onsite - no firewall port restrictions.
• For more complex sites, see User printing onsite - multi-subnet restricted network.

If you need to print at one site and release the job at another site, you need to enable the cloud node in your admin console.

How printing with PaperCut Hive and Pocket works

For a summary of how printing works with PaperCut Hive and Pocket, take a look at the How it works page in the manual.

For a more detailed look at the print job process and release print job processes, including the ports and communications at each step, see The print job process and The release print job process below.

Pros and cons

Network diagram

Ports

If you’re running the Full Embedded app, some platforms (MFDs) need additional ports to allow communications. For the complete list of ports, refer to Firewall ports and Networking .

The print job process

We are going to assume at this point that you have already read through the articles about getting your users joined to your print environment and that their computers or devices are configured to print. If you haven’t, read Getting started for administrators , which details the prerequisites and how to get your users set up.

Let’s now run through the process involved when a user prints in this environment.

Printing from Windows/Mac/Chromebook/Android

Printing from iOS devices

The release print job process

When it’s time for the end-user to release the print job, there are two different methods:

• MFD Release
• mobile device release.

MFD release

Mobile device release - via cloud service

Mobile device release - offline mode

If the link to the cloud services is unavailable, for example, your Internet Provider has gone offline, you can still release print jobs using your mobile device connected to your local WiFi. Here’s what the comms looks like.

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