Mobile Printing PrintBack App – Wait There’s More!

By Rob Houston, Product Marketing, Indirect Channels Business Group

Mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets, are becoming an integral part of our personal and professional lives – completing more and more tasks that historically were reserved for their personal computer. As we increasingly rely on these devices, the more capabilities vendors will need to provide. Many offer solutions that allow us to do more with our smartphones and tablets than we could imagine, including printing.

With the Xerox Mobile Print Solution, Xerox meets the mobile printing needs of our enterprise customers looking for a secure and manageable solution without the need to download drivers, tools or software. But a different approach was required for our small and mid-sized customers who use desktop printers and multifunction printers line who need a simple, individual solution they could deploy and manage on their own.

So Xerox formed a small team of software engineers to investigate how to support this currently unmet requirement.  The project culminated in Xerox PrintBack, a mobile app that allows our customers to print from their iOS and Android-based smartphones and tablets to the default printer installed on your computer, regardless of vendor, technology, or connection type.  The solution is free, and is designed to be installed and managed by the customers themselves – no IT support required.

This project is a fantastic way to gather feedback from our SMB customers as we seek to learn more about how customers are printing with their smartphones and tablets. Their input will help guide our work in the future and ensure we are adding the features our customers really want.

So what does PrintBack offer for enterprise customers? While it may lack in the kinds of security features that enterprise office environments require, for some it may be a good fit in a couple different scenarios:

• Personal printer in the office
• Home office use for remote workers
• Distributed organizations with branch/satellite offices

Is this an app you can benefit from as a business professional? If so, tell us how!

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Find out more about PrintBack and see if it can help your works become more mobile by visiting www.xerox.com/mobile/printback.  To try it yourself, visit www.xerox.com/downloadprintback.

Stay tuned for more mobile-related posts as we explore mobility in the enterprise leading up to mNext – IDC’s MobileNext Forum – on Nov. 30-Dec. 1.