MPI Tech News

Bring printing up to speed

With the EasyCom™ 10/100 Xpress from MPI Tech the print servers at Vester Kopi are no longer the bottleneck when printing on high capacity printers

Vester Kopi is the largest copy/print service company in Denmark with branch offices all over the country. The services of Vester Kopi cover every need in print output management including color copying, building drawings, plotting, web page construction and facility management. Vester Kopi is faced with a steadily growing requirement for providing on-demand printing as well as a more simple process for acceptance of digital print jobs directly from customers.

Challenge

The Vester Kopi headquarters in Copenhagen has the city's largest print output facility. The printer installations consist of many different printer units, from regular color laser printers to large scale plotters. The work environ-ment services Art Directors and Graphic Artists using a mixed environment of TCP/IP and AppleTalk connectivity."We have two major concerns", says Flemming Brandt, the Vester Kopi R&D Coordinator. "First of all, we are looking for PrintServers that fit in our advanced versatile environment and allows enterprise wide installation. Additionally, the ideal PrintServer must have a high throughput capacity and must, of course, be easily managed."Flemming Brandt continues: "Another issue for us is the increasing market demand for electronic delivery of digital print jobs of every kind. Our business must be able to offer the easiest way of communicating with our customers using the latest in technology. Our customers want the availability and proximity the Internet provides, and this can affect our entire print environment."

Solution

MPI Tech presented Vester Kopi with the EasyCom™ 10/100 Xpress PrintServer. The EasyCom™ Xpress supports both TCP/IP and AppleTalk and is most flexible in the more mixed and advanced of environments. "I was happy to learn that the PrintServer no longer is the bottleneck when printing on high capacity printers ”, says Brandt. He adds: "With EasyCom™ 10/100 Xpress we can set up PrintServers for a branch office remotely via the built-in web server and monitor its status via the MPI Tech configuration tool PrintGuide™ ".The EasyCom™ Xpress PrintServer proved to be more simple than Vester Kopi could have hoped for. "We found it to be extremely easy to configure and set up and it fits perfectly into our technically demanding environment. Management of the different features provided no learning curve for the administrators ”, says Flemming Brandt.

Benefits

The EasyCom™ Xpress PrintServer includes an e-mail notification system as well as an Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) server, which allows users to print across the Internet. For Vester Kopi these features were the most interesting. "We set the e-mail notification system to send a message to the operator ’s mobile phone in case of printer error.” “This way an operator was freed during the day and could furthermore monitor the large printers from home after working hours", Brandt laughs.Brandt is enthusiastic about the IPP part of the solution: "The IPP server is very exiting. The service to our large customers can be enhanced by offering direct Internet Printing opportunities to them. It can be faster, easier and provide cost saving for customers to send print jobs directly to our facilities via the Internet.With EasyCom™ Xpress, Vester Kopi can identify several applications: "I expect that the IPP technology can provide us with the tool we need for e.g. consultants to monitor the workload of our machine park", says Flemming Brandt. He continues: "We invest heavily in new printer equipment and right now many printers do not support IPP. It saves us a lot of money to use this PrintServer instead of buying network cards"."The EasyCom™ Xpress combines simple usability with cutting edge Internet technology and a feature such as the e-mail notification system and that certainly puts it on our list of things to buy", he concludes.