Mar 21, 2014Hewlett Packard (HP) will release a new app for Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled smartphones that will allow users to easily authenticate themselves before printing any documents. The touch-to-authenticate app, known as ePrint, will be available for download starting on June 1, the company reports, and will provide a more automated option for users of HP's Access Control technology, which prevents printers from printing any document until an authorized individual identifies himself or herself at the actual printer.
Some of HP's enterprise-class printers, such as the LaserJet M476, already come with a built-in Texas Instruments RF430CL330H NFC RFID tag that includes a wired serial peripheral interface (SPI) or inter-integrated circuit (I2C) interface to connect the tag to the printer, enabling the printer to receive data transmitted from NFC-enabled smartphones and other devices. The company offers its JetDirect 2800W card reader (with a built-in NFC RFID tag), which can be installed in a printer's Hardware Integrated Pocket (HIP). The HIP, a feature of all LaserJet MFP mobile printers manufactured in or after 2008, allows users to plug in a variety of accessory devices that add functionality to the printer.
NFC technology is already part of HP's touch-to-print feature, with which a user can present an NFC-enabled phone or tablet to a printer in order to initiate the printing of a document or other material directly from the handheld device. The printers—which are NFC-enabled via a built-in NFC tag, or the NFC tag incorporated in a JetDirect 2800w or Wireless 1200w HIP accessory—come with HP Mobile Print Accessories software that enables automatic printing. A user does not require an app, as the phone would employ the NFC peer-to-peer protocol to automatically upload the document file wirelessly to the printer and begin the printing process.
Since 2008, HP has also been selling a server-based Access Control Secure Print Authentication solution that allows companies that have a large quantity of HP's enterprise-class printers onsite to ensure that no document is printed in an unsecured way. For example, says Todd Gregory, the company's director of marketing for managed services, 25 to 30 percent of pages in the corporate environment, on average, are printed but never retrieved. This practice of printing documents without retrieving them presents a security risk for businesses, and also wastes paper.
Therefore, HP's Access Control solution was developed to enable the printing of a document only when an authorized individual comes to a printer to retrieve it, according to Jason Carney, Hewlett-Packard's Access Control product manager. An employee at his desk first presses the prompt on his or her PC to print a document, and then walks to a printer. A company may have multiple printers onsite, and a single queue to manage the printing jobs. In this case, the print jobs remain in the queue on HP's Access Control server until an individual identifies himself or herself at a specific printer. The printer forwards that data—a password, for instance—to the server, and prints the material if prompted to do so by the Access Control system. Until the NFC solution becomes available, the worker must provide identification credentials either by entering an authorized PIN into the printer's keypad, or, if a proximity RFID card reader was installed in the HIP, by tapping a proximity badge at that card reader.
The printer sends the PIN or badge ID number to an HP-hosted server via a cabled or wireless connection, and—if the printer receives an authorization from the Access Control software—prints the document. Otherwise, the queued document is never printed.
With the ePrint app, the process will be simpler. First, the user would download the app (being released in June) from Google Play. Upon running the phone app for the first time, the user is asked to enter her credentials (the ID provided by her employer to access her computer or other devices), which are forwarded to and stored on the HP printer server, linked to the phone's unique ID. She can then proceed to her printer of choice and tap her phone against that printer's NFC tag, and the phone app will transmit the ID number to the printer's NFC tag. The printer will forward that ID to the server, secure authorization and print the document.
According to Gregory, ePrint provides increased convenience for users who have NFC-enabled smartphones. In addition, it is another way to leverage the NFC RFID tag being built into HP's printers and card reader devices, in order to enable the printing of documents from phones and tablets.
The NFC authentication functionality, Gregory says, was requested by customers who wanted more options to make secure printing simple and convenient for personnel. "One of the things we've seen [among customers] is an increased focus on security," he states, because a growing number of people conduct business via mobile devices, and sometimes share personal and business interactions on a single device. Because a greater amount of data is being stored in the cloud, he adds, ensuring that information does not end up in the wrong hands has become more challenging. "All of this is changing the way IT needs to think about security."
Gregory cites the example of pharmaceutical company Merck, which uses 6,000 HP printers, managing its printing jobs in a single queue. Merck uses HP's Access Control solution to ensure that documents are not automatically printed when recipients are not there to retrieve them. In addition, the pharmaceutical firm can utilize HP Access Control's "job-accounting" feature, enabling it to store data indicating who has printed documents, the number printed and on which printers.
"We've seen an explosion in the use of smartphones," Carney says, noting that many Android-based phones are now equipped with NFC readers. The ePrint tap-to-authenticate app prompted "a tremendous amount of interest," Gregory adds, when demonstrated for potential end users at the GSMA Mobile World Congress event, held last month in Barcelona, Spain. "That's an indicator for us," he says, that customers will be using the technology.
"The majority of conversations our team had at Mobile World Congress," Gregory reports, "were with commercial and public-sector customers and partners who are looking to enable mobile printing for their users, or as a service they can provide to their clients." Simplicity and security are key, he says, "which is why both NFC and wireless-direct printing for mobile devices is so appealing—in particular, given the tremendous growth [in the use of wireless devices]."
