A Small Piece of Software with a Big Impact: Xerox AltaLink and VersaLink Now Come with a ThinPrint Client

Officially announced at the beginning of 2019, the enterprise printers belonging to the Xerox VersaLink® and Xerox AltaLink® family now feature a ThinPrint Client. Xerox has integrated ThinPrint directly into its firmware of Xerox AltaLink printers and Xerox VersaLink printers. The models of both printer families therefore now fully support ThinPrint technology. The ThinPrint blog editorial team spoke to Bernd Hausmann, Technical Director Business Development Printer Manufacturers at ThinPrint who played a leading role in the coming together of this OEM partnership.

ThinPrint Blog: Bernd, Xerox is one of the most important enterprise printer manufacturers. How did the collaboration come about? Why did Xerox integrate ThinPrint?

Bernd Hausmann: We’ve had contact for a while now and many discussions over the years – mostly about the framework of joint customer projects. However, from summer 2017, our contact intensified. The decisive reason for this was that a large customer from the financial sector required the integration of the ThinPrint Client into Xerox enterprise printers. After a number of negotiation rounds, Xerox then began development. First, the ThinPrint Client was released for the Xerox VersaLink family and recently the client for the Xerox AltaLink printers has followed.

ThinPrint Blog: What are the concrete benefits for companies using these Xerox printers that come with ThinPrint technology?

Bernd Hausmann: ThinPrint supports all major printers available on the market, regardless of their manufacturer. Thanks to integration directly into the Xerox firmware of the Xerox AltaLink printers and Xerox VersaLink devices, you no longer have to rely on external systems. On the one hand, this reduces investment costs and on the other hand, it really reduces the administration effort. In addition, the firmware is freely available to customers.

Another very important advantage is that the ThinPrint Client integrated into Xerox devices can decrypt the print job encrypted by the ThinPrint Engine. This means that end-to-end encryption can be implemented from the server right into the printer. Especially when it comes to GDPR data protection regulations, it is essential that relevant print data is encrypted correctly. What many people are not aware of, is that even a letter with a recipient’s address data contains personal data and must not be allowed to fall into unauthorized hands.

And the integration of the ThinPrint Client into Xerox devices delivers another important advantage – ThinPrint ensures enormous compression of the print data, which in turn is decompressed by the client integrated in the printer. All in all, this significantly improves print performance and vastly speeds up printing.

ThinPrint Blog: Are there any companies that are already using it?

Bernd Hausmann: There are several projects among our core customer industries. These are banks, insurance companies, logistics, public administration and healthcare. But things are just getting started as the Xerox AltaLink client was only very recently released.

ThinPrint Blog: What are the next steps in collaborating with Xerox?

Bernd Hausmann: First of all, we are informing our customers about the advantages this brings in terms of administration, performance and security when printing. Plans are already underway to implement support for additional ThinPrint solutions integrated into the Xerox printers at a later date. But we’ll talk about that when the time comes.

If you’d like to know which devices aside from Xerox where our technology is integrated into, take a look at our Strategic Partners page.