In a recent Blog by my colleague Tim Kollars, he previewed an upcoming series of articles by LRS technical experts. These authors will primarily be systems engineers, some with decades of experience in the field of enterprise output management. But before handing this series over to the real experts, I thought it would be best to define some key concepts you’re likely to hear in coming weeks.

In short, modern workplaces require information to be quickly and securely delivered to all employees who need it to do their jobs. Much of that information is in the form of documents, and some of these are shared with customers, suppliers, and other external stakeholders. The ability to capture output from any source, convert it into the correct format for the destination device, then deliver it in a secure manner is critical for business operations.

LRS coined the term “Enterprise Print Management” in 1994 to distinguish our original VPS® solution and its extensions from other print products on the market. But as PDF files, emailing documents, and web-based document viewing solutions rose in popularity, we realized that “print management” was too restrictive. Both electronic and hardcopy documents are valuable. The tagline “Enterprise Output Management” was born.

Why “Enterprise?”

The word Enterprise has many meanings, but setting aside Star Trek references, it usually denotes a business that is large, complex, or both. Not all large businesses have complicated document requirements, and some small- to medium-sized organizations do have extremely complex output management needs.

For the purposes of the upcoming Blog series, we can think of an Enterprise as an organization that has:

• Critical business processes that rely on timely delivery of documents
• Many different business applications, originating on a variety of hardware platforms, operating systems, networks, and/or Cloud environments
• Numerous employees doing their jobs from countless locations and accessing data in many ways, including PCs, thin clients, phones, wireless tablets, and more
• An expressed need to protect confidential data, either for regulatory compliance or simply to retain a competitive advantage

IT organizations in enterprises like these must ensure that stakeholders get the information they need in the fastest, most secure manner possible. An Enterprise Output Management (EOM) system provides a central point of control that helps IT resources define printers and other output destinations, easily manage user and network security, and proactively identify potential output delivery problems before they affect business processes.

EOM software should be simple, scalable, and flexible. Unfortunately, these qualities are often at odds with one another. Printing from one PC to one desktop printer is simple: connect the computer and printer with a USB cable and hit “print.” Enabling multiple PC users to share one printer across a network is more complicated, typically requiring a print server to be installed.

In an enterprise with dozens or hundreds of locations and thousands of printers, this gets messy fast. When a print job fails, IT staff don’t know where to start looking to resolve the problem. Now add a mix of applications running on Windows, UNIX, Linux, IBM Z mainframes, and even the Cloud, and the complexity increases exponentially.

Maintaining document security in such an environment is a daunting task. Multiple platforms and applications means many different security settings. Modern identity management solutions can make this easier to manage. What makes it even easier is a single point of control for managing all output regardless of origin or destination… one that integrates with modern, Cloud-ready OIDC security packages and supports end-to-end encryption from the moment of document creation to the successful delivery at the printer or other destination.

Future-Proofing the Enterprise

When it comes to technology, IT experts often don’t know what they don’t know. What new output devices will be available 5-10 years from now? Will your organization purchase a competitor or possibly be acquired by someone in the future? If so, will your applications, printer fleets, and output management solutions be flexible and scalable enough to manage this larger, more heterogeneous IT environment?

By definition, we all make decisions at a fixed point in time. What seems like a good fit for today’s needs may one day prove to have been an expensive mistake. Point solutions – simple, inexpensive fixes for today’s immediate problems – often prove to be inflexible and unable to scale as a company’s output management needs evolve over time. When that day comes, the cost to replace that “cheap and simple” solution with a new one could be pricey indeed. Offhand, I could name two automobile manufacturers, a leading healthcare organization, a large online retailer, and a massive governmental agency that learned that lesson the hard way. That is, I could name them. But I won’t, as all of them ended up once again trialing and/or purchasing LRS enterprise output management software after experiencing the shortcomings of a competitor’s solution.

As you will learn in the coming weeks, LRS has a different approach than most other solution providers in this market space. Our software solutions are built around widely accepted industry standards and incorporate the latest ones as our large and demanding customer base adopts them. We partner with the leading software and hardware vendors to certify compatibility with their offerings, thus mitigating risk for our mutual clients. We continue to deliver platform- and hardware-agnostic output management solutions, both to expand our market reach and protect our customers’ investments in LRS software over the long haul.

We hope you will enjoy the upcoming Blog series: Enterprise Output Management – the Modern Print and Scan Solution. As always, if you have questions or feedback on anything you read in our Blogs, please feel free to Contact Us and we’ll be happy to answer your questions.