Location aware printing

Years ago people started to talk about not using paper anymore. Especially in IT and consultancy firms there was a lot of talking and discussion about not using paper anymore and doing all from your computer. We have made some steps. A lot of the invoices send to you are now digital and your bank statements can now be send to you via e-mail or do it all online via your banking website instead of receiving a printed bank statement.

 However, inside companies paper is still used a lot, printing documents, whitepapers, documentation on technical issues, lists of customer design criteria, roadmaps and designs are piling up on desks all over companies. The IT firms stating in the beginning that the paperless office was coming are still using a lot of paper.

 I personally do not see a lot of change coming to that in the upcoming years. Even do a lot of people are reading PDF files, when it turns to more than 5 pages reading a lot of people do print them so they are able to curl up in a chair and read it in a easy and more relaxing way.  We do have Ereaders which do make reading a PDF somewhat easier however still paper is the most picked option.

 So a laptop nomad you traveling from company to company and location to location, home, work, customer, other customer, etc etc etc. You have to change your printer settings  on every location you visit and pick a other printer. Now windows is providing a solution in Windows7 which is called location aware printing.

 What location aware printing is doing is making life as a laptop nomad somewhat easier. It detects the network you are on and finds printers you configured for this network. So when you arrive from a customer location to your home office it detects automatically where you are based upon network characteristics and set your home printer as default so you can just click print without having to find the correct printer in a long list of printers.

 A lifehack for the laptop nomad that makes you life just a little easier and I have to admit I am not a fan of Microsoft as a product however this is a very nice option. You can find more information on location aware printing in windows on the Microsoft page.

Tags: laptop nomads

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Trends & webx.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.