From Frustration to Freedom – Welcome to Cloud Print

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, we surveyed more than 500 people across the United States and found 75%+ of respondents believe printed materials help them be more efficient, more productive, and more focused/less distracted.  But let’s face it – printing isn’t always easy.

I’ve almost always had global jobs that required me to work from anywhere. I’ve even had years where my primary office was the location I visited least.  However, no matter the size or scale of company, nor the size of the IT department, I’ve never found it very easy to print. And, as you learned about in that same blog, I benefit greatly from printing both work and personal materials.

Unfortunately, the consistent experience at every company I’ve worked for, from small start-up companies to Fortune 500 tech giants, is that printing isn’t easy. At my primary work location I typically only know how to print to the one MFP by my office and that’s because the IT team helped me set up that one printer driver and IP address when I first joined the company.

When I’m travelling to different offices, or heck, even to the other side of the building – I have no clue how to print (which IP address? how do I set it up? what’s our IT number?). So, I end up emailing documents to someone at the closest desk I can find near the printer I want to use. Clearly, that is neither efficient nor secure! I want to work from anywhere and be at my best wherever that may be, but frankly, I can’t.

The good news is cloud changes the game and makes it possible to get out of the constraints of on-premises networked printers and IP addresses. Last week we announced a cloud print tool that makes anywhere printing simple and reliable.

It’s great news for anyone with Toshiba MFPs trying to capitalize on the advantages of print to make their workday more productive and efficient. And, frankly it’s even better news for the IT teams trying to manage all of that on-premises print infrastructure while also fielding phone calls from people like me confused by a sea of IP addresses and print drivers, because all of that goes away.

Toshiba launched e-BRIDGE Global Print. This is a one-time download for your desktop or laptop that lets you send your documents to the cloud and retrieve them at your command from any Toshiba device with Global Print installed.

So what does this mean? FREEDOM!

Instead of figuring out which printer IP address, or worse, having to setup a new printer each time, I have one and only one location to print to from my system, and instead of some random 10.x.x.x.x it’s quite clearly called “e-Bridge Global Print”.  Voila, whatever I wanted to print is now accessible from any Toshiba device within my company that has Global Print installed.  That means I can walk up to the printer closest to me at the location I’m visiting and securely release my print!

Imagine the benefits:

• Simplicity – no more IP roulette: only one “Print To” location to keep track of, yet an almost infinite number of devices to print from
• Security – no more shipping documents around to others for print help, they stay in my control. No more running for prints so they don’t get viewed sitting in the tray, it comes out only with my PIN or badge and only when I’m ready to accept it. Documents are sent over an encrypted channel to an industry-leading cloud provider for safety at rest and in motion
• Savings – no more wasted prints that I ended up editing and sending again moments later (totally guilt of this one!) – I pick from my list of documents at the device and just skip those I no longer need
• Consistency – all documents convert to secure, compressed and universal PDFs for document consistency
• Quality – leveraging the native Toshiba print driver, finishing and features of the device are all accessible and the print quality is exceptional

And the results are real.  In less than 5 minutes I was up and running and printing to the Toshiba MFP of my choice.  Printing from my office, or any office with a Toshiba device with Global Print installed has never been so easy!  As one of our early testers said: “I’ve never printed when I went to the office before until I downloaded Global Print!”  Fill out the form on this page to get started with Global Print today. And say goodbye to print frustrations – and hello to print productivity!