Making the most of the BYOD phenomenon: how companies can ensure mobile printing reaches its full potential

We're seeing more and more people bringing their own devices (BYOD) to work and the BYOD trend is now widespread in the workplace.

Aberdeen Group reports that 75% of organisations allow employees to use their own mobile devices for work. And our own research found that over half of company staff (55%) regularly use personal mobile devices for work-related activities, says Sven Dellagnolo, Business Development and Programmes Manager EMEA, at Lexmark.

While many agree that personal mobile devices in the workplace offer many benefits, printing from tablets and smartphones still presents a challenge for many business users and few people take full advantage of this opportunity. Over two-fifths (41%) of those we questioned said printing business material from their personal mobile devices was important or very important. However, 77% said they rarely or never print company documents from their own mobile devices. This may be caused by a lack of support or technology to enable mobile printing, preventing employees using their devices to their full potential.

When companies insisted that their staff used corporate-sponsored mobile devices, mobile printing wasn't such an issue. Equipment tended to be standardised and e-mailing a document to a printer was an acceptable and easy solution. However, the BYOD trend is on the up; tablet computers and smartphones have become more sophisticated; and users' expectations have increased. All these developments have combined to make providing support for mobile printing more challenging than ever before.

The biggest challenges that IT teams face can be broken down into three areas.

User experience - Mobile devices often provide an excellent consumer experience but fail to impress at the business level. When employees want to print documents from their laptops or desktop computers, it is as simple as clicking the print icon. However, many tablet and smartphone operating systems aren't designed with printing in mind, so that ease-of-use can be difficult to emulate.

Device access - An IT department may be responsible for supporting many mobile devices. Add in multiple operating systems and the number of printers a user needs access to, and IT has a major challenge. Providing access to the network is just the first step. The bigger challenge is how to find, connect and send information to the user's printer of choice.

Output fidelity - Perhaps the most important aspect of any type of printing is whether what users are seeing on their screens matches what they pick up at the printer. For mobile printing, this means the document must be accurately converted to a data stream the printer can understand; otherwise the printed copy won't match the soft copy.

So, how can IT teams overcome these challenges and support the needs of a mobile workforce when they opt to use their own devices?

One simple and cost-effective solution is to use mobile print applications. These allow users to print directly to any printer on the company network from a WiFi- or 3G-connected smartphone or tablet.

And there are more advanced solutions that enable users to 'print from anywhere'. Whether that's at their desks, in a meeting room or when out on the road. This works by connecting the mobile device to the corporate 'print cloud'. Print jobs are securely held in a cloud queue until users are ready to release their documents on any enabled device in the network. Streamlining the printing process through the cloud helps businesses save time and money by giving users access to the most efficient printer and eliminating unwanted output.

The BYOD trend is still relatively new, but more and more organisations accept that it is here to stay and are actively embracing the benefits it offers. But for it to be a real success, IT teams must tackle the challenges it brings head-on to ensure maximum benefit to all concerned.

Background information: The Lexmark survey

Recently conducted research by Lexmark International has found that over half of company staff (55%) regularly use personal mobile devices for work-related activities.

Lexmark's survey, which questioned office workers about their use of personal mobile devices in the workplace, found that the most common devices were iPhones (36%) and smartphones (24%) followed by iPads (23%) and BlackBerrys (19%).

Of those questioned, over two-fifths (41%) said printing business material from their mobile devices was important or very important. Despite this, the survey found that only a few staff take full advantage of printing from their mobile devices. with 77% saying they rarely or never do so. This may be caused by the fact that companies are not well prepared to integrate and support employees' personal devices in their environments. This is underlined by the fact that 47% of the employees surveyed mentioned that their company has no policy in place for using personal mobile devices.

“There is no denying that the 'bring your own device' trend is here - and we believe it will increase,” said Mark Hiller, general manager at Lexmark South Africa. “It's also clear that printing from mobile devices is aimed at the consumer market, and currently the printing apps are not suitable for the office environment. For those bringing their own devices into the workplace, we offer solutions to make printing straightforward while staying within company printing policies. To this end, we offer a range of applications and technology to support mobile printing in a business environment, aiming to increase employee productivity.”

Survey background

Lexmark surveyed 710 office workers across nine European countries including Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the UK. The research was completed in April 2012.