BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN to print locally when network is down
uniFLOW’s Disaster Recovery (DR) mode provides authentication at the device for defined DR users, which allows access to the device functions. This will provide access to the copying function on the device which will operate fully without any network service connectivity.
However, in the event that there is no connectivity to the Print Management system, or even for that matter, other server based services (in the event of a network connection problem) this will result in normal Secure Print and Scanning functions being unavailable as both of these services are reliant on some form of server connection.
The device firewall restrictions also make it impossible to directly print to the devices and in a student environment - this is unavoidable in order to prevent users from circumventing the charging system.
To provide access to printing and scanning the USB printing and scanning functions could be used. This would allow users to print “print ready” documents (PDF, image formats) via a USB stick (provided) and scan documents to the USB stick. This does prevent Office documents (Word, Excel etc.) from being printing, however current Office applications enable saving to PDF easily.
The USB functionality would be enabled on nominated MFDs, to enable the printing of PDF files only when the Print Management System is non-operational.
For details of enabled MFDs and allocated users, please refer to BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN to print locally when network is down 25.10.17 which is in the Knowledge Base on Service now help pages.