The Cluster provides over 2500m² of co-working office space (which includes Australia’s first co-working Penthouse) with shared work areas and private offices, venue spaces, beautiful boardrooms and meeting rooms, reliable fast internet, social and networking events, investor networks, receptionists, telephony, IT support and incredible views. The Cluster has a large, diverse and friendly business community.
The Cluster is a Bring-Your-Own-Devices-based company. This results in a highly heterogeneous environment, consisting of Windows, Linux, Mac, and lots of mobile devices; all wanting the ability to print.
Sam Tuck, Network Administrator at The Cluster, explains the previous logistics of on-boarding a new user at The Cluster: “We would create a new user on our old print server and then arrange a time with the user or company to add the print driver manually, so that they could use our print facility. We’re all busy and trying to find time to get this done was not easy and caused frustration with all parties. Approximately 400 clients use The Cluster at any one time with a lot of movement within the user community. To allow for people coming and going all the time we required a suitable solution.”
Sam remembered being introduced to Micro Focus iPrint in the past, and believed this could be the answer for The Cluster. iPrint offers cross-platform printing from any mobile device and empowers end users to easily locate and install printers.
iPrint was easily installed and soon began to earn its keep. It allows users to be automatically synchronized from Active Directory (AD), so when a user is created in AD during the initial on-boarding process, they will have full printing capabilities within 15 minutes. When the user installs the printer, iPrint automatically chooses the correct drivers depending on the operating system and any other configurations.
The Cluster caters for a diverse range of industries, from law firms to designers, from accountancies to VR programmers. Because of this diversity, their clients seek to use various technologies in order to print, from desktop PCs, to laptops, to smart phones and tablets. As many of their documents are highly confidential, they like the secure print facility offered through iPrint. Users have to authenticate before the print jobs are released. This security step ensures that only the owner collects the document so that confidentiality is maintained.
The WalkUp printing feature is also proving useful: many times users print document but forget to collect them from the printer. WalkUp printing prevents such accidental and unwanted prints by putting the job on hold and also automatically deleting any dormant jobs. The users can now print or cancel the hold job at their convenience, preventing paper and ink wastage.
Sam likes the flexibility iPrint has given him: “With iPrint, we now easily encompass anyone on any device and it has completely eliminated the manual effort of getting new users set up with our printing facility. This alone saves on average 30% of my time. The process has been completely automated and streamlined. Users are able to set up their own printing without any IT support. You can’t beat that!”
Issues are rare and quickly resolved and the printing facility has enabled The Cluster to offer a competitive IT service to its clients.
Sam concludes: “If we were looking to expand The Cluster beyond Melbourne, iPrint allows us to create the same convenient IT experience for clients elsewhere. The partnership with Micro Focus has been great and we look forward to our continued success together.”
