If you look around your office, you might see a lot of people using smart phones and tablets. The iPhone, iPad and Android devices are becoming very common in businesses today. One of the big trends driving this is “bring your own device,” or BYOD. According to the Aberdeen Group, 75% of organizations allow employees to use their own mobile devices for work.
Mobile devices make life easier and letting an employee or contractor bring their own, let’s people be productive with their device of choice. One area that is still a challenge is printing. If I let an employee use her own laptop running OSX, Windows or Linux, it’s easy for her to print. But printing from tablets and smartphones can still be a problem.
Making mobile printing easy and consistent from numerous devices should be the goal of IT departments. The experience should be that same whether it’s a guest, who needs to print a presentation, or a sales person trying to print a quote while they run to a customer. Providing access to the network is just the first step. The bigger challenge is how to find, connect, and send information to the user’s printer of choice.
