Microsoft Office 365: Are there really any printing problems?  

When Microsoft introduced Office 365, it took the corporate world by storm! The innovative software as a service (SaaS) solution offered users access to their favourite Microsoft Office productivity tools from one single platform.

Productivity levels soared for corporate users, with enterprises across the world purchasing the SaaS subscription for their organizations. With additional products catered specifically for business environments, such as Skype for Business and SharePoint, Office 365 has become a mainstay for most organizations.

As new, innovative SaaS solutions are introduced into the market, they also bring along their own challenges.

With recent reports of users experiencing printing problems when attempting to print from Office 365 applications, we decided to explore these findings. Let’s look at printing from Office 365 applications!

Office 365 Printing from Desktop Computers

Office 365 running on desktop computers can operated in one of two modes, either from a locally installed session or through an online-browser session.

When deploying Office 365 after downloading the software to your desktop, all applications run locally on your workstation, except Microsoft Outlook, which is hosted on the cloud.

Users can also access Office 365 through their online browsers, which in reality does not entail running in the cloud, but simply means running the Office 365 applications in an online-browser session, within your personal computer’s environment.

This is similar to the way that Google’s Google Docs is operated.  With the computing power and resources all being provided entirely by the user’s workstation, surprisingly, there should be absolutely no problems when printing from Office 365 using your desktop computer!

However, when attempting to print from Office 365 in enterprise settings, users may face the same issues that all organizations face when attempting to print, such as slow printing speeds, printing downtime, driver misconfigurations and incompatibility issues, security concerns, location-based printer mapping issues, and difficulties printing from various devices.

As outlined, none of these printing related problems are due to Office 365, rather they stem from general enterprise-wide printing  problems.  Users printing from Office 365 should be able to experience regular, error-free PC printing!

Check out this free whitepaper on secure cloud printing from Microsoft Office 365 and Azure!

Office 365 Printing from Mobile Device

Generally, mobile devices do not offer many printing options, resulting in certain complexities when attempting to print from mobile, whether it be from an Office 365 application, or any other application for that matter.

Consequently, we can see that Office 365 itself, does not initiate or cause any printing problems due to its particular features or technical specifications per se.

However, an enterprise-wide solution is usually required for successful adoption and implementation of mobile printing in any organization.

Enterprise mobile printing solutions usually work by converting the mobile print job into a PDF file, which is then sent to the provider’s server, usually running a universal printer driver solution, as there are little to no options for mobile print drivers.

By adopting an enterprise mobile printing solution, organizations can unify and streamline their printing process, allowing them to print in an efficient, seamless manner from any application platform, whether it be Office 365, or otherwise!

Solution: Adopt Enterprise Mobile Printing

Is your workforce experiencing problems while trying to print from Office 365?

You might want to explore the platform being used to print from and deploy the application. Is it a local desktop environment?

In this case, you may be having other enterprise printing problems, resulting in consequential secondary issues when trying to print from Office 365, as Office 365 desktop printing should be error-free from local workstations.

If using mobile devices and experiencing printing problems, you may need to look into implementing an enterprise mobile printing solution for your organization.

Additionally, to alleviate mobile printing issues that seem to be related to Office 365, you may want to look into third-party solutions that directly integrate with Office 365 and enable you to print directly from their third-party platform.

Mobile printing can be completely painless when using an Enterprise Mobile print solution, whether printing from office 365 or any other application!

Check out this free whitepaper on secure cloud printing from Microsoft Office 365 and Azure!