Canon Offers Wide-Ranging uniFLOW Output Manager
Print Management Suite
October 30, 2008 - In early October, Canon U.S.A., Inc. announced the availability of Canon uniFLOW Output Manager in North and South America. Already distributed in Europe, Australia and Southeast Asia, uniFLOW Output
Manager is a modular, scalable print-management software solution that affords
companies greater control over their print operations. uniFLOW Output Manager
can improve efficiency by intelligently routing each print job to the output
device best suited for it. The solution can also reduce printing expenses by
re-routing jobs from devices with high per-page costs (such as color printers
or personal inkjet printers) to less-costly devices when appropriate.
“Instead of widely deploying printers, companies are
trying to right-size their deployments with centralized MFPs,” explained Dennis
Amorosano, senior director of Solutions Business Development at Canon. “With
uniFLOW, we are enabling customers to take the next step and manage not just
office printing, but also the production print center.”
uniFLOW Output Manager is a modular solution
consisting of the core server product and additional modules that add specific
functionality tailored to a company’s needs. For an office environment, a
customer could request modules to handle job accounting and cost recovery; user
authentication, including hooks into a company’s card-based identification card
system; and secure print release, whereby a user can walk up to any output
device on the network and release a print job from the uniFLOW queue and apply
the finishing features available on that device.
For companies with production print centers, uniFLOW
Output Manager can be configured to handle job ticketing, Web-based job
submission, PDF workflow and more.
One of uniFLOW Output Manager’s main features is its rules-based
job routing, where jobs of a certain size or a certain type are routed to the
optimal output device. For example, the software can intelligently recognize
when a monochrome job has been sent to a color device and then re-direct it to
a lower cost-per-page monochrome device. Or uniFLOW can route a large print job
to a more appropriate device in the company’s print center. With a small
utility installed on the client PCs within a company, uniFLOW can also
re-direct print jobs from high-cost-per-page local printers to a less-costly
central MFP. Whenever a print job is re-routed, the user gets a pop-up message indicating
where the document has been output.
The solution works with Canon and third-party output
devices. The core server product can be deployed on an existing server with
computing bandwidth to spare, though Amorosano reported that it would more
likely be deployed on a dedicated server, especially if a company intends to
add several modules to increase the solution’s functionality.
uniFLOW Output Manager was developed by NT-ware, a
software development firm in which Canon has a 70-percent stake. Amorosano
reported that uniFLOW Output Manager is not replacing a current product, but
rather is an addition to Canon’s solutions portfolio and will co-exist with
more targeted single-function solutions such as Canon imageWARE Accounting
Manager and Equitrac cost-recovery solutions.
Pricing varies depending on the size of the
organization and which modules are desired, but Amorosano estimates a typical
installation of the uniFLOW server plus one module would start at less than
$10,000. “That’s less expensive than sourcing the functionality from various
software vendors, and alleviates the integration and administration headaches
that approach would pose,” he noted. That said, businesses that need just one
aspect of uniFLOW Output Manager’s functionality—and that don’t foresee the
need for its other services—are better candidates for a targeted
single-function solution, as such a deployment will be more cost effective.
In the broader market, uniFLOW Output Manager
competes with a range of standalone applications. As noted, Canon imageWARE
Accounting Manager and Equitrac’s offerings are available directly from Canon
to handle job accounting, and third-party solutions such as those available for
the eCopy ShareScan platform are also available. American PrintWare Inc.’s
RoutXpress and RX5to1 can handle print job re-routing (see APWI
Helps Dealers Capture More Clicks), and EFI’s Digital StoreFront is
available to automate print center workflow over the Internet. In terms of
integrated solutions, Print Audit 5 comes the closest to matching uniFLOW
Output Manager’s capabilities, offering job accounting, usage analysis and job
re-routing capabilities (see BLI’s July 2006 Solutions Report). But no
integrated solution BLI has seen to date also includes uniFLOW Output Manager’s
authentication features and additional modules to serve the needs of production
print centers.
Canon Business Solutions and independent Canon
authorized dealers can resell uniFLOW Output Manager directly to interested
customers through Canon U.S.A.’s Professional Services program. Canon’s trained
consultants and technicians are available to assist with opportunities and
implement solutions at customer locations.
