Printing
Business Data Engine does a lot of printing for small businesses, in particular if you have the shop enabled. It prints order sheets, event tickets, stock tracking labels, shipping labels, and much, much more. Printing from the web is difficult though, and here at Delta V Technologies we have several ways to make it easier and reliable.
Contents
Business Data Engine Print Proxy (Recommended)
The Business Data Engine Print Proxy is a device we've created to help solve this issue. It sits on your network and establishes communication back to the BDE Print Gateways. It can either connect directly to a printer via USB, or can be connected to network printers.
The BDE Print Proxy is a hassle-free way to bridge the divide between the on-premises printers and the cloud-based Business Data Engine. It creates an encrypted print tunnel back to the BDE print gateways so that we can send data to it securely.
Your BDE Print Proxy will be allocated a name, typically the same shortname as your site, suffixed by two digits. For example, if your site had a shortname of "advancedtech", your Print Proxy will be called "advancedtech01". If you ordered another, it would be "advancedtech02", etc.
Delta V Technologies will configure the printers once the device is connected and ensure that all aspects are working, before giving you the appropriate Internet Printing Protocol URLs to put into the printer queues on BDE.
The BDE Print Proxy costs £100+VAT for the hardware and includes 30 minutes of engineering time to complete the setup. There is no annual charge for the BDE Print Proxy, but support is charged at the prevailing rate.
If you are able to expose the printer to us on the internet, we can send print jobs directly to it, over the wire. Note that this is, by default, unencrypted. You can either share a raw printer (typically TCP port 9100) or you can share via Internet Printing Protocol.
You will need to expose the printer to us via some public IP you have. It may be possible to expose it via NAT (look for port forwarding or similar). All BDE communication will come from the IPv4 network 195.246.200.196/28, or IPv6 network 2a0d:12c0:2000:33::/64. Please talk to your IT department if this is a route you wish to follow.
Print-via-Email
We support print-via-email where instead of printing the job, it is emailed (as the raw print job!) to a destination email address. This is useful for some of HP's new printers, which support email-to-print.
Note that this is not guaranteed to be encrypted and we cannot be held responsible if jobs do not print once we have sent the email. If you have access lists restricting who can email the printer, you will need to allow printjob@businessdataengine.com and the no-reply email address set in the site settings to print to the printer.
Direct Print
This option is only available for on-premises customers. Direct print allows BDE to print directly to a printer on the local network. This is useful if you are running BDE primarily as an internal tool.
