Over the next couple of weeks, inhabitants of the Forum will note the appearance of new Xerox MFD’s in the South West printing areas of the forum. These are mono devices which also function as photocopiers and (colour) scanners. The Forum dweller may also spot that the existing Xerox MFDs in the North East print areas are beginning to sport small grey boxes and may suspect that these changes are to do with the long heralded arrival of cloud printing in the Forum. They would be right in that suspicion.

Since we have agreed to postpone the deletion of the existing direct print queues until the end of the second semester, the conversion to cloud enabled devices need have no immediate effect on how Forum users collect their printouts. Jobs sent to the old queues will print out without any further action on the user’s part. What will change though is the procedure for photocopying and scanning. Once a device has been cloud enabled, users must tap their University ID card on the device reader (the small grey box mentioned earlier) before they can photocopy or scan. One benefit of this is that when scanning, the user’s email address will be automatically set up as the default destination for the scan, though the address can be changed if required.

When a user taps their card against a reader for the first time, they may be asked to indicate which account they wish to associate this card with by typing in their user name and Active Directory password. This should only be necessary once. If you don’t know what your AD password is, please contact support.

If you have not needed to pay for printing within the School in the past, please take the time next time you are passing a cloud enabled device to tap your ID card on the reader, enter your account details if necessary, and check how much free print quota you have credited to your account. If it’s not in the region of £500, please contact support in the usual way.

More Clouds on the Horizon / Computing Systems by is licensed under a