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Technology giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) announced the launch of software designed to make printing from mobile devices to printers on the corporate network easier and more accessible.
HPJetAdvantage Connect lets mobile devices print to printers on the corporate network with an intuitive PC-like print experience, without extra steps such as opening a print app or sending an email to the print queue.
“It is becoming increasingly common for people to use their mobile devices in the office,” Ed Wingate, head of JetAdvantage Solutions for HP, told eWEEK. “We have also seen some banking and retail companies adopt a 100 percent mobile tablet fleet in their stores. As a result, the ability to easily print from these mobile devices is no longer optional—it is a necessity.”
HP has updated two other offerings designed to make it easier for IT to support printing from mobile devices in a corporate environment, including HP Access Control Secure PullPrint, which makes the print authentication capabilities of HP Access Control available as a standalone offering at a lower cost.
With this solution, IT can provide the same monitoring and protection features for print jobs coming from mobile devices as they do for print jobs coming from PCs. In addition, HP Access Control 15.2 has been updated with support for the latest security protocols and the ability to use pull printing across IT environments with multiple domains.
“Making these solutions easy to use is critical. When solutions are difficult to use, employees don’t use them and it impacts their ability to accomplish their work,” Wingate said. “Previous generations of mobile printing solutions have required that end users either send an email to the print queue or open a separate print app. As people spend more time working with their mobile devices, the experience of printing from them needs to be seamless.”
For HP Managed Print Services customers, HP also is introducing a set of business intelligence tools to give customers a transparent view of their printer fleet, along with predictive modeling to help prevent potential problems before they occur.
“When it comes to IT security, printing is often overlooked, but it is important to take steps to secure your print environment as part of a well-protected IT network,” Wingate explained. “HP’s new business intelligence tools provide an additional layer of security by delivering detailed firmware upgrade status and device usage data, which provides visibility into potential security vulnerabilities in your device software and alerts you to non-authorized usage.”