We started out with the desktop computer that had a Printer attached to it via a cable. Then came the laptops and with that portable printers, not really practical but that was about all we had at the time.  So the best you could do when you were on the road back then was save your document, send it through your email account and have someone at your office print it for you. Or you could just wait till you got back and print it yourself. There has always been that disconnect, nothing ever seemed to really work all that great for printing when you were on the road.

Then came the iPhones and iPads which are increasingly taken the place of laptops and the challenge has stayed the same, how do we turn digital documents into printed ones when your not sitting at your desk. For example let’s say your a doctor and you want to print patient notes or prescriptions from your iPhone? Or your an IT guy who is working on an upgrade for a customer and you want to print a photo of a cabling setup before you upgrade it, a picture is worth a thousand words. Or even something as simple as you want a hard copy of a document you have stored in DropBox.

There is Apple’s AirPrint Technology that promises to make that possible but only if your printer supports it and in all reality, most don’t. I don’t think it makes a whole lot of sense for anyone to have to go out and buy a new printer or printers so a piece of software will work with it, not a very Eco friendly thing to do either. And from most accounts I have read in reviews about this software it’s anything but easy to set up and use.

Enter FingerPrint 2.2 from Collobos, which fits the bill perfectly, it works with Windows and Macs, and allows printing from iDevice’s to just about any printer out there that’s connected to a PC, turning the printer into an AirPrint-enabled printer . Not only that, it now supports virtual printers as well. What this means is you can now “print” to cloud based services like Dropbox and Evernote. What you do is add Dropbox to your list of printers via FingerPrints desktop Client, once installed, Client will detect all the printers on your PC, including those connected to your network and make them available to any iOS device, pretty slick.

So if you added a Dropbox account to your “list of printers”, instead of ending up with a physical page, FingerPrint would route your email, photo, document, or whatever to the Dropbox folder on your PC, which would, in turn, sync it to your Dropbox account. Easy and painless way to share or archive any document. Once it’s in the Dropbox folder, you just pull up the folder you want, hit print, pick the printer you want the job to go to and presto, you have your printed file.

FingerPrint 2.2 also added new security features, it now supports enterprise-level printing environments, those with more than 25 printers and “Printing as a service”, meaning you can print without being logged into a computer. Collobos does not guarantee compatibility with all printers but we have not been able to find any complaints so far.

The software is compatible with the latest versions of Windows, Mac and iOS. FingerPrint sells for $19.95, which by the way is a lot less than buying a new AirPrint ready printer. I think this is a fantastic solution for the SMB (small to medium business) looking for an affordable way to print while mobile, check it out and we would love to hear your feedback if you start to use it.

And to make your printing even more painless try our Eco-Friendly brand of ink jet and laser toner cartridges, recycled and re-manufactured to the highest quality standards that will save you on average 30%. Check us out at Ink & Toner Solutions, Inc