Posted by Devin Anderson
Pull printing has emerged as one of the most useful ways for organizations of all kinds to implement a secure printing protocol among their workforce. Not surprisingly, though, many organizations balk at the idea of having to deploy even more physical infrastructure to gain one piece of extra functionality. That’s why demand for serverless pull printing has increased.
Before we explore serverless pull printing in more detail, let’s pause briefly to look at what exactly pull printing is and why it’s beneficial.
Pull printing—sometimes referred to as secure pull printing—turns the act of printing into an intentional two-step process. Broken down, it looks like this:
- The user initiates the print job. This is no different to how computer users have been printing for decades—they simply click “Print” as usual. The job is then sent to the destination printer, where it’s held in the queue instead of being carried out immediately.
- The user allows the printer to execute the job. Once at the printer, the user engages some kind of authentication mechanism such as a badge or card reader. That authorizes the printer to start the associated pending job. The user then retrieves the job from the output tray once it’s finished.
What does this achieve? Several things.
- By ensuring that the user is physically present before a job can begin, the jobs aren’t left sitting in the output tray for anyone to see. This advantage of secure pull printing should be apparent to anyone in the healthcare or high-tech industries, where confidentiality is at a premium.
- Pull printing cuts down on consumables usage because it prevents jobs from being abandoned or reprinted multiple times after last-minute corrections are made. If a user spots a typo just after clicking “Print,” the previous job can easily be cancelled before the final authorization step.
- It allows for added flexibility. Let’s say you want to print a meeting agenda on a distant conference room printer but the room is currently in use. With pull printing, you can print your job at a different printer without disturbing the current meeting. Simply authenticate and execute the job at nearest convenient printer.
Unfortunately, many pull printing solutions require additional hardware, such as a dedicated print server that’s used exclusively to provide secure pull printing functionality. This is far from desirable, particularly in organizations that are trying to reduce infrastructure by migrating to serverless printing.
PrinterLogic’s next-generation print management solution was designed to provide serverless printing to any organization, and that naturally applies to its powerful but easy-to-implement Pull Printing feature as well. You can enable secure pull printing throughout your entire print environment—including those with legacy printers—without the need for any additional infrastructure. As a matter of fact, PrinterLogic enables you to eliminate print servers across the board to attain truly serverless printing that’s cost-effective, enterprise-ready and full-featured—even in VMware and Citrix environments.
You gain flexibility too. Our secure pull printing paradigm gives you the choice of three different release methods. You can use either a tethered or network-enabled badge or card reader that integrates with your existing ID system. You can use PrinterLogic’s embedded control panel app for supported printers. Or you can release from any device with a browser, such as a PC, a mobile phone, or a nearby tablet in kiosk mode. And in each case, it bears repeating that no print server is needed.
There’s a lot to like about pull printing, but there’s even more to like when it’s serverless, seamless and intuitive. That’s what you get with Pull Printing from PrinterLogic.