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:

•Fast, precise, and secure printing from servers in cloud or network environments, to print devices local to users

•Document distribution to users on desktop and mobile devices, with a zero-install browser interface

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.

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 compression to reduce network impact. 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 folder, by emailing directly to the browser client, or by using an API.

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

Cloud printing is slow and cumbersome	CirrusPrint provides very high compression ratios to speed delivery of print streams to remote printers. Remote sites connect to the server, rather than the server connecting to printers, so it solves many firewall and router configuration headaches, without requiring a VPN.
Email delivery is inconsistent	Email servers can bog down, and sometimes severely restrict document sizes. Users deal with spam and other clutter. CirrusPrint provides a fast, direct route from printing to application users.
Cloud print services can see my sensitive data	Documents can contain data that you don't want routed through third-party services. With CirrusPrint, you own the data from end to end.
Print jobs lose features	Some cloud print solutions convert documents to different formats, losing important print job features like duplex and tray management. Print formats sent through CirrusPrint to printers are not modified in any way, and retain these critical features.
Cloud ERP has limited print capability but good email	CirrusPrint provides email-to-print functionality. Email PDF files to CirrusPrint addresses for immediate printing and delivery

•Stateless design, so document transmission can occur as remote sites are available

•Precise printing using exact replication retains features such as duplex and tray control