Sensitive documents left lurking in the output tray. Colleagues comparing bonuses, salary and benefits, because letters were momentarily left where everyone could see them. Damning project post-mortems or HR reports abandoned on the printer, or interleaved with someone's monthly reports. Sales forecasts shuffled in with a proposal going out to key customers or partners. The output tray of a workgroup printer can be the source of business nightmares, where a slip-of-the-mind or a brief delay could mean people seeing things you really don't want them to see. With HP JetAdvantage Private Print these fears fade away. It's the technology that puts you in control from the moment you click print to the moment you pick up.
With JetAdvantage Private Print, documents aren't sent immediately to the printer's print queue, but to a cloud based solution that holds each print job until released. Go to the printer, enter your PIN and release the job and it prints out rapidly on demand. Jobs are encrypted with 256-bit AES security, meaning they're safer in the cloud than they would be on many print servers, and can only be printed when the user who originates the job authenticates and selects the job for release. What's more, with HP LaserJet printers and MFPs fitted with HP Proximity Card readers, you don't even need to remember a PIN.
Why Private Print?
Why is this important? Because every business, every department and every manager will occasionally need to print sensitive documents; documents that we might not want others to see within the company, let alone externally. Unfortunately, workgroup printers don't always work that well on this count. It's too easy to start a print job then get interrupted or distracted, only to find that the sensitive documents you didn't want seen have been sitting in the output tray where anyone might find them.
Imagine a scenario where a departmental manager prints out salary review letters for the staff on their team, only to be interrupted by an urgent call. Without Private Print, our manager makes his way to the printer to find that the letters have already made it from the output tray, into the hands of waiting team members. Suddenly everyone is comparing salary packages, bonuses and benefits and he has a lot of disgruntled team members on his hands. This is grief he doesn't need.
It's also grief that could have been avoided. With Private Print he would arrive at the printer, wait while his colleagues pick up their print jobs, then enter his PIN, select the job and request it for release. The letters print out in under a minute, and then get taken back to his office where they're safe from prying eyes.
More good reasons
This scenario isn't the only reason why Private Print makes sense. For a start, it saves money and reduces waste. We all know people who set large print jobs to go and then forget them, leaving the prints clogging up the output tray for hours at a time a waste both of money and resources. With Private Print enabled, this just doesn't happen. Print jobs only print when released at the printer, at which point they're almost certain to be picked up. Plus, we all make mistakes. Ever had that moment where you realise you've set to print a rough draft in maximum resolution and full-colour, or on the expensive specialist media you shouldn't normally use? With Private Print, it won't print until you ask it to, giving you a chance to remove the job and do things right.
Private Print can also be more flexible and convenient. Because it's cloud-based, mobile workers can print from laptops or mobile devices on the road, then release and pick up the prints when they return to the office. You can print a job from the second floor then pick it up from near the fifth floor boardroom, ready for the meeting, or from any other Private Print-enabled printer in the building. The solution works across both HP LaserJet and HP OfficeJet printers and MFPs, and with the cloud doing all the hard work there's no additional investment in servers or network infrastructure. What's more, it just comes as part of the package.
Private Print even aids consolidation, for companies replacing a larger fleet of workgroup and personal printers with a smaller number of high-performance workgroup models. Some managers might object to having to share a printer with the whole floor or department, but with Private Print they can't argue that it's insecure. You can have consolidation without reducing confidentiality: a big win for budget holders, smaller businesses and stretched IT departments.
In short, Private Print isn't some specialist feature that only affects a handful of large enterprises, but a smart, free and easily-used and implemented option that makes printing more secure, keeps sensitive documents confidential and helps deliver peace of mind. With that in mind, the question isn't so much why your business needs it, as why any business wouldn't?
