In October 2010, Compugen's head office and Central Branch staff all moved into our modern, new headquarters building in Richmond Hill.
A noteworthy aspect of the IT environment supporting users and operations in the building is a completely new print and imaging infrastructure, highlighted by a move to a more centralized print model based on print centres, printer device consolidation based on MFPs, and perhaps most notably the adoption of 'follow-me-printing' (FMP) functionality (a.k.a. "pull printing" or "secure printing"). FMP changes the way users print, from 'pushing' print jobs to whatever print device they choose, to 'pulling' pending print jobs from a central server only when the user authenticates at a print device somewhere within the print environment.
The objectives that shaped our new infrastructure include the desire to reduce cost, print more efficiently, improve the tracking and manageability of print assets, enhance security around printed documents, and further align our print activity with our commitment to sustainable IT.
Let's explore several aspects of how FMP contributes to those objectives.
With FMP, the need for users in Finance and HR, for example, to have personal printers for security reasons goes away since documents are only outputted at printing centres when the user is there to authenticate the print job and immediately retrieve the document. This allowed Compugen to substantially reduce the number of print devices needed, from 85 previously (ranging from large, networked MFPs to small, locally connected personal printers) to just 9 MFPs in the new building, a reduction of nearly 90%. In addition, the PC-attached personal printers were expensive to operate and harder to track from an 'asset management' perspective because they were 'off net'.
FMP also helps reduce the volume of printing, thus reducing cost and environmental impact, not only by eliminating the waste arising previously from unclaimed or duplicated print jobs, but also by forcing users to consider whether a print job is really necessary. Users may no longer be so quick to send everything to print, knowing that they now have to get up and walk to a print centre to retrieve those jobs; and when users, standing at a printer in the print centre, authenticate themselves and see all the print jobs in their queue they will have to wait on, they may choose not to print certain jobs after all.
Oh, and by the way, the adoption of FMP technology for Compugen's new head office–we chose SafeQ by YSoft for this particular need–was also driven by our desire to ensure that, as a provider of print optimization solutions and services, we are fully conversant in the application and potential benefits of this exciting technology and the 'lessons learned' that can only come from hands-on implementation experience. So, if you would like to find out how this Compugen knowledge and experience can help your organization shape and implement an effective enterprise imaging strategy, feel free to either e-mail me, visit www.compugen.com or call us at 1-800-387-5045.
The Hewlett-Packard Colour Laserjet 9050 MFP is a core component of the Compugen FMP strategyCompugen's Follow-me printing infrastructure depends upon Hewlett-Packard devices.
