Ricoh Americas Corporation today announced Ricoh HotSpot Enterprise, a new mobile printing solution that keeps all documents and data behind the company firewall.

Maintaining document security is among the highest priorities of most organizations. To support this critical objective, Ricoh’s HotSpot Enterprise solution routes all documents through a private cloud hosted on the client’s infrastructure. Instead of sending documents to a public cloud server for routing back to enterprise printers, Ricoh HotSpot Enterprise creates a secure internal private cloud for the entire mobile printing environment. The user experience is the same as with the original Ricoh HotSpot Printers and MFPs, and transmissions are encrypted at all times.

As the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) culture continues to expand in organizations, the use of tablets and smartphones challenge organizations to deliver a printing platform that does not require IT resources to configure every device for printing. Traditionally, when these workers have needed to print, they have been forced to email the file to a networked desktop, if available, and have it printed from there, an obvious productivity drain. Ricoh HotSpot Enterprise is designed to keep documents within the enterprise, which is critical for the many companies with sensitive personal, financial, medical, engineering and strategic information.

With Ricoh HotSpot Enterprise, users have multiple ways to print a document: via email, web upload, mobile app or Windows desktop print driver.

Broad coverage for Ricoh and multivendor fleets HotSpot Enterprise can handle thousands of users and print devices, even traverse entire networks, so the service can accommodate an organization’s expanding mobile-user base. Ricoh HotSpot functionality can also be easily configured to cover mixed, multivendor fleets.

Through simple server software, Ricoh HotSpot Enterprise relieves IT of the work of managing mobile printing. IT professionals don’t have to download software to office equipment or touch users’ mobile devices. The software enables easy mobile printing for guests, but a company can choose to limit printing to network users by easily configuring it to leverage LDAP directory databases such as Microsoft Active Directory.

Ricoh HotSpot Enterprise also integrates with popular accounting software to process printing charges to users or departments. This is useful in education environments when schools want to enable campus- or system-wide printing and process payments on student access cards. Students can easily print from their laptops, smart phones and tablets without having to join the secure network domain. Ricoh HotSpot Enterprise includes special Web interfaces for educational settings.

This is part of the broad range of mobility solutions Ricoh offers to help organizations accommodate an increasingly mobile workforce. It complements the new Ricoh Mobile Worker Services portfolio, announced in September, designed to give mobile workers instant access to the information they need to be productive.

For more information on Ricoh’s full line of products, services and solutions, please visit www.ricoh-usa.com.