Stand and Print Securely

Ricoh added proximity cards to its user authentication line-up to ease and speed the process grabbing your print job from the queue at shared printers.

Announced Oct. 22, card authentication uses contactless identification tokens. Similar to door access cards, users do no more than get close to the printer—typically, one to three inches—rather than swipe a card, enter a P.I.N. or scroll through a list of waiting print jobs.

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"You walk up and hold your card up, and automatically get the list of documents youve queued," said Craig Temple, document solutions product manager for Ricoh.

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"Companies like [user authentication] security, but wanted to automate some of the process," Temple said. "Companies already using proximity cards [for front door access] can leverage them, or this may be the application that gets them to move to proximity cards."

Print job security is appropriate, says Temple, "for groups like Payroll and HR, or in medical/healthcare, legal, financial, insurance, education, and other industries that need to print confidential or sensitive information, and want to use shared MFPs."

Ricohs Enhanced Locked Print-Extended Edition document security solution and Enhanced Locked Print Suite already include the software for card authentication to work on multifunction printers, but requires a USB host adapter for the MFP, which retails for $150, and a USB proximity-card reader, retailing at $399.

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