Mobile Printing Challenges
Last week, Zebra hosted a group of tech leaders, CIO’s and CTO’s, technical architects and developers at its Americas’ APPFORUM, an event focused on sharing the latest insight on architecting and developing enterprise solutions.
I had the opportunity to give a keynote on next generation printing for Android developers. Following the talk there was some candid conversation about the roadblocks that challenge this group on a daily basis.
- Printing is the beginning of visibility to customer assets, but adding printing capabilities into your applications can be very complex. ISVs and developers don’t want to deal with the headache of learning ZPL and I don’t blame them. Fortunately, there is a better way. By using a REST API and an integration engine that acts as a service bus, ISVs and developers can easily add printing capabilities for almost any printer family into their apps without learning printer languages and coding templates.
- End user IT resources are scarce and costly. Many times, the end user IT team has to support printing applications that require coding and deployment for every label change. This takes them away from other mission critical tasks. We discussed how ISVs and developers can deliver applications that empower business users to design, print and manage labels and documents without the help of their IT teams. Business users can create documents and make changes in seconds via a next generation designer. They can check these changed documents into a web-based document management system which assures that the changes are controlled and instantly provisioned to all the mobile devices within the environment. The result? IT resource costs are reduced and costly errors are eliminated.
This is an exciting time for the Zebra developer community! Next generation label management allows you to build solutions that deliver new levels of agility to your customers. To learn more, visit NiceLabel's managed design and controlled print web page.
We’ll also be at the next APPFORUM event in Europe, June 14 -16, 2017 in Prague, Czech Republic. The early bird registration has been extended through May,26th 2017!
Lee Patty
