Hosted SaaS solutions are one of the fastest growing trends in the enterprise information technology industry. As organizations continue to move to remote cloud based networks, the potential for problems or technical challenges also increases. This is particularly true of the printing experience.
From an enterprise point of view, taking advantage of a cloud-based hosted solutions’ flexibility and low cost is understandable. However, the overall printing experience is often lacking and can present many challenges, provide limited capabilities, requires leaving the application’s user interface, and includes many tedious steps just to accomplish ordinary tasks. Logs are not available to show technical staff who is printing, what they are printing, or the number of copies printed. The hosting app essentially loses all control of the document from a printing standpoint.
To address these concerns, a robust, feature rich print management solution like OM Plus i-Sat is required. OM Plus i-Sat is a secure, reliable, scalable solution that allows secure delivery of documents from a hosted SaaS solution to non-network environments, for example, affiliates, home offices, business partners, and subsidiaries, etc…
How does OM Plus i-Sat work with Hosted SaaS solutions?
In order to establish a link from point A to point B, a small OM Plus agent is installed at the host site. When a SaaS user requests a job from the host, the print job is then ingested by the agent into OM Plus. OM Plus makes a secure connection with the i-Sat software located at the remote printing site. Once authentication is confirmed, OM Plus encrypts and compresses the print job and sends it securely over the cloud where it is uncompressed, unencrypted, and delivered to the local printer at the remote site.
Hosted Printer Fleet Management Software
In addition to OM Plus’ ability to work with third party hosted SaaS solutions, Plus Technologies also offers its own hosted printer fleet software. The product is called OM Plus Fleet Manager. Fleet Manager equips organizations or Managed Print Services with greater control of their print management software, printer and multifunction or copy fleets.
How Does Fleet Manager Work in a Hosted Environment?
Although Fleet Manager is offered in both hosted and on-site versions, the hosted solution is highly recommended. Not only does this alleviate support staff from the burden of hardware, deployment, and configuration but it also provides a highly scalable experience with low bandwidth requirements.
Fleet Manager gathers near real time data such as page counts, color and mono pages, copies, scans, faxes, errors, device health, toner levels, and more. Fleet Manager parses the data from print management software, analyzes it, notifies users, and generates reports. Users trust Fleet Manager to monitor device usage, device up-time, automate consumables ordering/replenishment, and alerts for technical issues. This data can be used to optimize printer fleets.
Key Features
- Highly customizable by the end user
- Implementation on site or hosted SaaS solution
- Device data collector is centrally managed
- Network efficiency – designed to minimize traffic
- Quality and depth of data retrieved
- Ease of use – intuitive interface
- Flexible licensing models – usage, ILF, Subscription
- Low cost of ownership
- Customizable alerting
- High quality customer support
- Device “up-time” reporting
- Flexible collection strategies
- Secure
- Printer agnostic
- Support for local device counts
Benefits
- Automate print services
- Device data enables fleet optimization
- Optimize consumable ordering and swapping
- Visibility of device status
- Alerting of device errors
- Customizable reports, queries and data export
The Future of Hosted SaaS Solutions and Remote Applications
As customers rapidly adopt new technologies such as software as a service, Plus Technologies is eager and prepared to evolve with those markets. Customers can expect Plus Technologies to align its current and future products like pull printing and remote print software with these new technologies.
