How to Outsmart COVID with MyQ

We hear the term “non-essential” mentioned quite often these days, as businesses are slowing down in their tracks to think about how to best allocate their resources and energy. Maybe one of the things we can and should do without is using a multifunction printer — especially since we are cautious about frequently touched surfaces, and a printer’s control panel is a good example of such a surface. Still, we would like to show that with the right print management solution, printers can become smart assistants that offer welcome help.

In our previous post on this topic, we suggested you equip your office with Contactless Printing. The first “hack” was to enable logging in to a printer with one’s badge and having all prints come out automatically, and the second using the MyQ Mobile App on to operate the printer because any person is — in an ideal case — the only one who touches their smartphone.

In this sequel to the first article, we would like to suggest 2 more ways MyQ can make your life easier these days. It might come in handy in the fairly regular scenario where a company is split among essential and non-essential staff, and both groups of colleagues need to make the long-distance relationship work.

In-Office and Home-Office: Making it Work

Let’s say you are a “non-essential” worker on home office, you have VPN connection set up and your in-office colleague James contacts you about a competitor analysis checklist they need to hand out in a management meeting. The analysis is 26 MBs large, because it contains a lot of graphics, so a standard e-mail box won’t accept it. To make matters even worse, said meeting starts in 3 minutes (we’ve all been there, so it’s a distinct possibility). You might wish at that point you could just send the file to the printer directly, so James can pick it up at the nearest printer and make it to the meeting in time.

And that’s exactly what you can do if your MyQ has Shared Queues set up. It’s a practical solution for people who need to delegate print jobs to one another, and it doesn’t even matter if they share a department or just happen to be on the same project together. The IT Admin can even “make it so” that users can add other users to their Shared Group themselves.

Creating a Shared Queue

The queue can have multiple printing devices assigned to it, as long as they are equipped with embedded terminals. Documents sent to this queue are stored on the server until a delegated user logs in to a printer and releases them.

MyQ’s IT guy Mike has put the steps down on a cheat sheet for other MyQ Admins out there:

Using Scan-to-E-mail

James is back from the management meeting and starts typing up a summary to give you an update on the outcomes. It seems he has a rather large heap of notes. Wouldn’t it be easier if he could just scan them over? It would because he also happens to have very neat handwriting.

MyQ has a function called “Scan to E-mail”, which automatically sends captured documents to the scanning user’s e-mail address and/or to other specified e-mail addresses. Your IT Admin can take this function one step further and define a network folder as a destination for your colleague’s scans — a folder which your colleague shares with you, so you can access it from home.

Here comes a second cheat sheet by MyQ’s IT guy Mike:

Of course, just to be on the safe side, James should use a hand sanitizer after he finishes scanning and logs out. There is no way to avoid contact with a printer when you need to scan something, but if the gain is a good deal of saved time, we believe it’s worth it.