Mobile and Cloud Printing: Neat, but Necessary?
HP has been going full force promoting its various mobile and cloud printing technologies. I'm interested to see how well this technology takes off, and what markets and demographics will find it the most useful.
First, there's ePrint for BlackBerry smartphones, which came about as a result of the strategic alliance between HP and Research In Motion. HP ePrint Enterprise allows users to remotely print to network printing devices, at any of their company's offices, from their BlackBerry email application. The ePrint application will also allow users to print at HP ePrint-supported public locations, including Hilton hotels and FedEx Office locations. Although the ePrint application supports a variety of file formats (Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents; PDFs; image files; HTML files; text and rich text files; and XPS documents), it's still limited in that whatever you want to print has to be accessible from your BlackBerry.
I can see how the enterprise version would be useful for remote employees and office visitors who are only at the office for a few days. They can now easily print documents from their email without having to bother the IT department to configure a printer on their laptop or set them up with a PC. For companies that use BlackBerrys significantly, and share documents primarily my email, this makes sense. I don't see as much use for the printing capabilities that employees will have when they are actually out of the office—under what circumstance would a remote employee need to print something at a distant office? If it's to print something for someone else, it would be just as easy to email the document to that person and let them print it. If it's to print something for themselves on the way to the office, well, that's when they need to stop playing with their BlackBerry while they're driving—in all seriousness, it could be useful for printing large documents that you need first thing in the morning, before you get to the office. Of course, if you’re printing before office hours, and the printer runs out of paper, toner, etc., as printers tend to do, you're still out of luck.
HP's main suggestion for using ePrint in public locations is to print boarding passes. For that, and for emergency situations where you forgot to bring a necessary printed document, this service will be useful, but we will have to see if people will find this service useful for casual printing.
HP's latest announcement in mobile printing has been the release of printers with unique email addresses, allowing users to print from any device that can send an email. This broadens the ability to print from any type of smartphone or even the iPad, which does not have built-in printing capabilities. Discussion on the web has centered on spam and security concerns. If unwanted advertisements that come through fax machines aren't enough, imagine the potential junk that could come through on a printer if all the spammer has to do is send an email. I have to assume there will be settings that can control what is printed and what isn't, but the details on this aren't yet clear. The other concern is the security of the documents being sent—will there be any encryption options? Since the first printers with this feature are targeted at home users, this potentially isn't a high priority yet. What does seem to be a priority for HP is to build their collection of "print apps" that let you access content to print directly from your internet-connected printer: daily news summaries, coupons, forms, greeting cards, coloring sheets for your kids, and much more.
You have to respect HP for being far ahead of the competition when it comes to mobile and cloud printing, but is the ability to print from anywhere, at any time, really necessary? In a world that's supposed to be going "paperless," this is encouraging us to print more. Shouldn't we be trying to print less? Instead of being able to print a big report before an important meeting, shouldn't it be sufficient to email it to attendees and/or project it on a screen? Instead of printing out a boarding pass at a hotel, shouldn't airlines expand their online check-in services so that nothing needs to be printed? Instead of being able to print world news summaries directly from a printer, shouldn't you just use that fancy BlackBerry to view it online?
From a managed print standpoint, mobile and cloud printing applications may just be another complication in the attempt to control print. I can't say it's not neat though—it's definitely neat.
Posted by Emily Offshack on 06/18/2010