Print On-The-Go with Job roaming
For many workers, long-gone are the days when they work exclusively in one location, with their activities confined to a single printer. MyQ endeavors to offer solutions that complement organizations and individuals who are frequently on the move.
Job Roaming in MyQ allows flexibility when you’re deciding where and how to print your documents. If you’re moving from one branch to another, even across countries or continents, there’s no reason why your print jobs shouldn’t travel with you and be available at your convenience.
Whether it’s because you’ve taken a last-minute trip to another branch or prefer to prep your docs at one office and print them at another where you meet clients, your print jobs can be ready for you wherever you need them. Read on to discover how Job Roaming in MyQ makes this not only possible, but easy.
Job Roaming Overview
Job Roaming is possible in any MyQ setup that contains multiple sites run from one Central Server. Jobs sent to print from one Site can be retrieved and printed from an Embedded Terminal at another site.
The print job is stored on the original Site server until the user logs in at another Site, where they download the job to the Job Roaming queue. Thanks to the fact that the files are not unnecessarily transferred between servers, this method guarantees the lowest possible network load.
You can select which users or user groups you want to allow to use the Job Roaming feature, if relevant roaming jobs should be kept in a separate job list or added to the same list as local jobs, and if they should be printed by the Print All command. You can also manage exactly which queues should be used for roaming jobs.
To give a simple example of how this works: a user in your Dublin branch is preparing documents to print for clients in London. From the Dublin branch, they send these documents to print on a Pull Print queue, but do not print them. The following day after arriving at the London branch, they simply authenticate at an Embedded Terminal, select the job they sent the previous day, and hit print to get a hard copy in their hands in seconds.
Benefits of Job Roaming
No Need to Travel with Documents
On a very basic level, job roaming can reduce the resources you need to travel with from one branch of your organization to another. In some cases, this might be ideal because you’re travelling light, or don’t want papers to be folded or creased. In more extreme examples, you may have many hundreds of pages to print which were prepared in one location but are required in another. Airline baggage restrictions are a headache enough without kilos worth of paper on one side of the equation.
One Unified Printing System
You might be wondering, at this point, why you wouldn’t simply save your documents in a cloud storage, access them at the required destination, and hit print. Of course, this is an option. However, having print roaming enabled within MyQ means that your printing preferences, policies, and settings are seamlessly replicated from one site to another. It’s a different printer, but everything else is the same.
Flexibility Between Branches
If your role involves frequent travel between your organization's locations, you want movement between them to be as seamless as possible. This includes your documents, both those in the cloud and that you need a hard copy of. There’s no reason that the documents you sent to print in Dubai shouldn’t be there waiting for you in New York, and using MyQ with job roaming, they are. Send your documents to print when they’re ready, and print them whenever, and wherever, you are.
Increased Security
Keeping your documents within MyQ, rather than saved in an external storage location or device, also serves to increase your security. Everything stays on one server, controlled by you, until you’re ready to print it out. This reduces the possibility of documents being lost or even stolen, whether in hard copy, an external storage device, or from a compromised location online.
Industry Use Cases
If you’re still not sold on the benefits of job roaming, we’ve compiled some industry specific use cases, to illustrate the potential convenience.
Manufacturing
Fred works for a large manufacturing firm with a central office and several branches, each of which serves primarily as a factory, producing electronic devices. He oversees health and safety, and one of his responsibilities is travelling to these sites and overseeing the training of new safety initiatives.
From the central branch, he prepares a single document, which eventually, needs to be printed and handed out to hundreds of workers at different branches, when they receive new training. Rather than getting on a train or plane with cases full of these papers, he travels to the relevant site with nothing other than the knowledge of his MyQ PIN, logs on to an Embedded Terminal at the relevant branch, and prints the correct number of copies based on how many employees are attending that day's training.
Finances
Jackie works for a large private investment firm, with branches located globally. She often travels between offices to coordinate with partners and high-profile clients, though it’s not always possible to know exactly what will come up during meetings beforehand.
She has a variety of information packets for different investment vehicles prepared at any one time, so that she always has the resources she needs to give clients information on their options. They are prepared for print and saved as Favorite jobs in MyQ. This means, after an initial chat with a prospective investor, it takes her only a few minutes to head to the closest printing device and obtain copies of three different info packets which she thinks might be of interest at this particular meeting. Her next stop is in San Francisco, where she can repeat the process with whichever documents seem most appropriate based on what she learns after arriving.
Healthcare
Dr. Singh practices almost exclusively at one large hospital complex in London, it’s an old institution spread out over several buildings with different specialties. While preparing hard copies of a patient's paperwork and treatment options, she discovers they have been moved to a specialist ward in a different building.
Knowing that the patient's family are visiting, and hoping for an update on their condition, she rushes to the specialized ward, without printing the papers on the office printer she normally uses. Thankfully, all the devices throughout the complex are managed on a MyQ Central Server, meaning the documents she didn’t yet print are waiting on her private queue when she logs into the printer on the specialized ward. In minutes, she can obtain a hard copy of the information she’s carefully compiled and run off an extra copy for the patient’s sister to take home.
Job Roaming from One Location
The idea of using Job Roaming without travelling to a different site might seem counterintuitive, and certainly for many organizations there’s no need for this solution. However, those managing a large and diverse fleet of printers may find this solution simplifies and streamlines their processes.
If your operations are large enough to justify running multiple print servers, it may make sense to connect them all to a single central server and allow users to implement Job Roaming to keep their jobs ready regardless of which device is closest. This means jobs sent to print on a floor or department running on print server A can easily be accessed and executed on devices running on Server B, without the need to re-send documents.