Introduction

CirrusPrint® is a software product designed to make document printing and distribution more streamlined and intuitive when sending documents over a network. If you need to print or distribute documents from the cloud or over a distributed network, you can benefit from CirrusPrint technology.

CirrusPrint offers several important features related to document distribution in modern cloud and network environments:

Cloud Document Challenges

As companies move their computer systems and business applications to cloud and hosted systems outside of their own networks, they find printing slows down and becomes difficult to manage. Users need to see their documents quickly, whether in print or on screen, but are no longer close to the source of those documents.

Unlike software applications, printers must remain local to the users they serve.  Printing over the Internet or any wide area network, with its relatively low speed, becomes a bottleneck.  Users wait longer than before for their documents to print, and the act of printing adds to the overall network usage.

Printers are difficult to manage across networks, adding routing and firewall management headaches, or requiring a VPN, which itself adds costs, management headaches, and security concerns.

Print data is often confidential and must be secured so that as it travels over the Internet, it can't be captured by third parties.  Many cloud printing services, including those offered by printer manufacturers, route this data through third-party data centers.

Print data can contain printer instructions, such as when to duplex or which tray to pull paper from.  Cloud print services often convert print data to different formats, losing this embedded printer control, or modifying page scaling in ways that can affect precise printing requirements such as barcoding or MICR fonts.

Many cloud ERP solutions offer limited print capabilities, requiring a user to produce a PDF and then manually print the document to a potentially limited set of printers, particularly if they are mobile users.

Mobile users also struggle with accessing documents printed by an ERP solution, where the only option is slow and cumbersome email.

CirrusPrint Solution

With CirrusPrint, the systems that create your documents can be anywhere, and you can still print, view, and store those documents locally.  Security is maintained as documents are transferred across the network, using SSL, an important feature when using the public cloud.  SSL is optional, however, in cases where document security is maintained in other ways, such as a VPN.

When documents are delivered to locations and users, CirrusPrint uses both standard compression and patented network reduction techniques. This makes the data transfer as efficient as possible, with significant byte count reductions to reduce the time and overhead of document transfer.

When delivering documents to users, CirrusPrint offers a faster and more direct route than email.  With the HTML5 browser client, applications can deliver documents to users by printing to them, or dropping files into a server-side folder, or even by emailing directly to the browser client.

CirrusPrint solves several of the challenges encountered when running applications in the cloud or other wide network environments, as described in this table:

Key Features