Watermarking Documents

Data “stamping” on print jobs is a feature that has been available in the print world for some time. The ability to stamp static information such as a company name/logo (Watermarking) or even department or username on the edge of a page is often available by default.

But what if you needed more? In this blog we will look at more advanced features that can be accomplished with Print Management.

Metadata Stamping & Security

Stamping simple information such as Logos is great but what if you need to stamp Metadata information regarding the print job. This is a frequent question we come across from companies concerned about security. Metadata stamping allows you take the information around a print such as who submitted it, how many colour/total pages, when it was printed and much more, and place them as stamps automatically around the document.

Just about any piece of information you can imagine about the print can be added to a stamp. Each stamp area can be customised by font, size, text colour and more.

QR Codes

QR codes are a great way to get information into a small space on a page. We’ve all seen them on documents before. People often think about the QR code for incoming documents, scanning and analysing it to retrieve the data, but what about generating them? Print management can be customised to generate QR codes automatically when documents are printed. This is especially useful for documents that are sent out and then returned, as they can be filed & sorted quickly using scanning automation.

This example shows a QR code being dynamically generated on a print job by extracting the Invoice number and Customer ID as well as the document name.

Can I have both?

Both simple stamping & QR code abilities can be combined. Rather than printing the Metadata as raw information on the page, which may pose security/GDPR concerns depending on the data you wish to show, the Print Management system lets you automatically generate and print a QR code which contains only a unique document identifier.

This addresses the “who left the printout on the train” security scenario. The QR code does not contain any information which anyone “on the train” can make sense of. However, once the document is returned to you, staff can look up the print by the document ID and see who printed it and when. The identified user can then have a fun conversation with the security team!

Just the surface

We will be continuing this series of print management blogs, so let us know if there are topics or questions that you are interested in. However, we could write dozens more and still only be scratching the surface of what is possible. If you have a question or requirement around printing, scanning, automating or security for any of these, feel free to get in touch.