SafeCom would appear to be out of favour wherever you look and whoever you talk to. PaperCut – a well known alternative – is beating the competition all over the place. However, despite its ageing interfaces and poor marketing efforts it is worth remembering where SafeCom still scores highly:

1. SQL Admin passwords are stored encrypted and virtually inaccessible. The password is only known to Nuance Support.
2. SafeCom provides excellent application failover features:
   1. Device clients can reference more than one SafeCom server. If their primary SafeCom server is unavailable the device contacts the next.
   2. Pull Print Queue Port Monitors can reference multiple servers. If their primary SafeCom server is unavailable the device contacts the next.
   3. Users can be failed over to an alternative SafeCom server when their SafeCom Home Server becomes unavailable. This is controlled by the Master server.
3. SafeCom only minimally relies on the Windows Print Spooler. As the standard Windows spooler has known virtual memory limits this prevents many challenges linked to the spooler. SafeCom uses the Windows Spooler only for the initial spooling job. Queued jobs are encrypted and stored on the SafeCom server. When a job is released the server decrypts the print job and sends it to the device, without the need for holding print queues.
4. SafeCom Post Tracking is extremely feature-rich and can identify detailed information about the printed job, such as page numbers, mono colour and format.
5. The recent upgrade of SafeCom G4 also enhanced many of the infrastructure security features by supporting newer protocols.

Given recent security breaches I feel SafeCom should not be dismissed too readily.