Friday, July 15, 2011

EFI Direct Mobile Printing

Today, EFI is in the news announcing that Canon is now supporting EFI's direct mobile print technology in their imageRUNNER ADVANCE lineup of color and black & white office systems utilizing Fiery-based imagePASS and ColorPASS controllers.

EFI's direct mobile print technology enables printing directly from Apple iPad, iPhone and iPod touch devices. Read the entire release regarding the Canon partnership on Whattheythink.

Apparently, software has also been available for a few months to support this with some Xerox devices, including the Color 550/560.

I didn't see an official announcement of this, but when I searched the web for this technology, I also found it referenced in an EFI datasheet about a product called EFI PrintMe Server, which apparently is a privately accessible version of PrintMe, or some kind of end-point for output of PrintMe-submitted jobs. The datasheet is a little unclear as to who the target market is-- it talks about "Your Customers", almost making it sound like "you" are a print for pay establishment, and your customers are going to mobile print to your "company". But the photo is of a MFP, so maybe you are a hotel (one of the core markets for the PrintMe service), and your customers are actually "guests." I guess I'm going to have to get someone at EFI to explain it to me!

Back to the point, though, this PrintMe Server apparently also includes Direct Mobile Printing to Xerox EIP-enabled MFPs without a mobile device application and without using the PrintMe Cloud. Xerox EIP MFPs are automatically discovered by the PrintMe Server software and presented as an available printer from within the user’s mobile application. See prior RichInternetPrinting blog posts for more discussion of mobile printing and Xerox EIP.