SECURE PRINTING MFP M477fdw

[Nathan101]

Hi Guys,

We have just purchased a HP Color LaserJet Pro M477fdw for 2 people in our finance team to use to print sensitive documents from.

We presumed that a secure print option (where users input a pin to release their documents) is a pretty standard feature, especially on a laser printer.

I have seen that this is possible but you have to insert a USB drive into the machine to store the jobs. My question is whats to stop a malicious employee stealing the USB drive and acquiring sensitive data? 

Thanks

[tonerspills]

Nothing is preventing that. You could have them save their sensitive files to a USB stick and have them take it to the printer and print on demand, rather than risk having someone take the USB stick with jobs stored on it out of the printer.

[Nathan101]

Thats ok, but if a user has a lot of files this is going to be very time concsuming compared to a release all function on other manufactures printers.  As this is my first experence with HP printers are they always set up this way?

Thanks

[tonerspills]

The only way I know of to secure print on this particular model is through the use of a 16GB USB stick in the back port of the printer as outlined in the user guide. This printer does not have an internal hard drive, so that's probably the reason for the need of the USB stick.

Wish i knew of a better solution to offer, but probably walk up USB printing would be the most efficent method with this model. Your users that need to secure print could just create a folder on their PC of files they need to print, then just copy that folder to a USB stick so they can walk up and on demand print from the USB stick. Alot of printers that have an internal hard drive or some type of internal storage will offer secure print features without the need for an accesory.

There may be some 3rd party solutions out there, but i have not tried any and would not be comfortable recommending them. Here are some examples, but anything requiring a HIP pocket like the proximity card reader probably wont work with the M477

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/solutions/business-solutions/printingsolutions/documentsecurity.htm

[DSwanRChives]

This is not a feature I use, but my understanding was that you could print to the USB stick in the back of the printer, and by selecting "Make job private/secure," the material would be stored encrypted on the USB stick, and would only print in response to the user's PIN or password entered on the printer's touchscreen.  So if someone made off with the USB stick, they wouldn't be able to read the docs stored on the stick.

This is covered on pages 46-48 of the manual.

[Nathan101]

Hi Guys, 

Thanks for getting back to me, yes i suppose we could go down the encrypted root, it just makes things a bit more complicated.

One question, if the printer doesn't have any internal storage where are the normal print jobs stored? (so if i just sent 5 normal print jobs to the printer where are they held?)

Thanks

[DSwanRChives]

It has onboard memory - just not very much.  256MB.   So jobs pass from the spooler through this memory.  Depending on the size of your jobs, they may be held in the spooler on the sending device until there's room on the printer.

[Walefresher]

Please I just got my Colour Laser jet pro mfp M477dw. I want to ask if I can print on cardboard using the printer?
Thanks

[DSwanRChives]

"Cardboard" is pretty vague.  Could mean anything.  Here's the list of compatible paper types and sizes:

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c04799975