For as long as computers have been connected to printers – from the earliest dot matrix to the most modern LaserJet – the evolution of printing has been to make the printing workflow follow the user’s workflow rather than the other way around. Nobody today would consider taking the lift to a different floor to collect their job from The Printer!
No change, however, was as rapid or ubiquitous as the pandemic-driven embrace of hybrid work – an abrupt change that has clearly become permanent. In most businesses, staff are unlikely to ever return to a working life that’s 100 percent in the office.
That cultural change demanded changes in technology – both in the technology companies made available to their staff (ubiquitous videconferencing is just the most visible of the changes), and in the culture that defined how those technologies are used.
Director of printing systems ANZ Rachael Williams said: “As a company that’s always centred the customer in how we innovate, HP has studied how hybrid work has transformed what customers need from their printers. In a hybrid world, people don’t print a document and hand it to another team member – people aren’t in the same place as each other or, perhaps, as the printer.
“It was our job to understand how the workplace changed, and to support that change in what we offer our customers,” Williams said.
“It was our job to ask our customers: ‘How has your world changed? How do we need to support and enable your employees in this new world? How do we maximise productivity and minimise disruption in the hybrid workplace?’”
The hybrid workplace hasn’t eliminated the printed document, particularly among small businesses: writing in the outlet Entrepreneur, Sarah Mayer wrote that 91% of SMBs rely on printed documents to run their business – whether it’s invoices, contracts, expense receipts, the list goes on.
But if someone living in Seven Hills needs a printout for a colleague in the office in Chatswood, the business is likely to find it hard to support them – the common workaround, “email it to me and I’ll print it here” may not always be timely or efficient, but the business might struggle to manage any more complex technology.
With the launch in March of our HP Color LaserJet 4200/4300, the HP Color LaserJet Enterprise 5000/6000, HP is supporting those new needs and workflows.
The Color LaserJet 4200/4300 Series doesn’t only come with easy and robust management tools built with an eye to the decentralised workplace, they come with HP’s industry-leading Wolf Security embedded and preconfigured out of the box.
https://www.hp.com/us-en/security/endpoint-security-solutions.html Wolf Security gives printers advanced threat detection, self-healing capabilities, and endpoint isolation to help the business manage risk without disrupting the user experience; while the HP Smart Admin Dashboard puts management of all a business’s printers from a single display.
The other driver to change the way we innovate is business’s demand that we deliver on sustainability.
Williams said: “Tech can no longer treat innovation and sustainability as contradictions, and cutting our products’ environmental footprint can no longer be treated as a costly luxury, and at HP, we continue to make commitments to the market about how we will deliver more sustainable products.
“Our customers expect it of us,” Williams added.
In HP Color LaserJet printers, the innovation that powers our combination of sustainability with high performance is the TerraJet toner technology, now included in all new printing solutions from the small business up to the large enterprise.
TerraJet lets our printers use 27 percent less energy while printing and cuts our plastic use by up to 78 percent – without compromising the performance our customers demand of us: up to 20 percent more printable colours means users get sharper detail. And HP TerraJet cartridges are designed to have a lower carbon footprint than their predecessors.