Have you sat in traffic on the way to school, fuming because the paper is due and you aren’t going to have time to print it out before class? Those days may soon be behind you.
“A mobile print service is under construction and will soon be available to students,” according to Steven Hood of the NAIT Print Solutions work unit, which is part of the Learning Teaching Commons. This innovation has been in the works for about a year now.
Other post secondary institutions already use this service. Also known by such trademarked names as FollowMe, Find-Me, Global Print and Personal Printing. Essentially the technology is called Pull Printing. The concept being that the user’s print job is pulled to the user from a cloud or server. This allows flexibility and it is seen to cut down on wasted paper as the user has control over where the job is printed. The added advantage is the security. The job is not printed until the user
swipes their card or otherwise enters their information and therefore is not left sitting where others may accidentally pick it up.
NAIT has chosen to call it mobile printing since it encompasses the ability to print from a mobile device. Be it a smart phone, tablet or laptop, you will soon be able to send your documents to print while you are sitting in traffic, in class, or ultimately from home. Whether you choose to submit your document by downloading the mobile app or by accessing a webpage, your print job will go to the NAIT Follow-You print queue. The NAIT Follow-You print queue releases the document to whichever printer you swipe your student ID into. This sounds incredibly simple and students won’t have to stress about waiting for a free computer just to print a document. How long the document will live in the NAIT Follow-You print queue is still in question.
Print Services is anticipating that this will be a service improvement to all students and will increase their options to print.
The mobile application and web submission page are still being developed, students will have to wait a few months for the service. It is anticipated that the NAIT Follow-You printing service will be in full operation by the fall of this year.
This service has been implemented in response to student concerns that computers are not always available. The computer commons are very busy and there is hope that being able to send to print from students’ personal devices will alleviate the congestion.
Print Services has already estab-lished the Follow-You print option in the NAITSA computer commons and is looking forward to making it available campus wide. There are also some long-term plans to have this available for students to use from home.
Information is on the new website, nait.ca/printing, and when the service is fully operational, students will be able to access instructions on that web page.
Jennifer Rae
Photo by Brendan Chalifour
