Introduction
HP Workforce Experience (WXP) is a cloud-based fleet management platform designed to allow IT admins to secure and administer their fleet of PCs, printers, and peripherals. The platform is built upon elastic cloud computing principles that can add or remove processing resources as needed to ensure optimal performance. The Print feature helps manage a fleet of printers.
Target Audience
Primary Audience:
IT administrators and support personnel who set up and manage the WXP platform for print resources (all roles).
HP Partners who use the platform to manage print requirements for their customers.
Key Features
One of the main strengths of the platform is that it will allow admins to manage all their PCs, printers, and peripherals through a single browser-accessible portal. The Workforce Experience portal lets you:
Monitor the status of your fleet of physical resources, either through a variety of dashboard widgets or through device-specific pages.
Define security and supported feature profiles for various groups of devices.
Run a wide range of reports assessing the state of the fleet. For example, you can run a security assessment to determine if any devices pose a security risk, or you can run the health assessment of your fleet to identify resources that may be performance-compromised.
Remotely remediate issues with devices by amending configuration settings.
As the platform matures, new features will be added, and existing features will be improved.
Workforce Experience Manages Two Types of Printer Connections
In terms of print management, Workforce Experience can manage two kinds of printers:
Cloud-connect printers: Cloud-connected printers are connected to the HP cloud by enabling HP Cloud Connection, either on the printer control panel, or through the printer’s embedded web server. (Older HP printer models may refer to HP Cloud Connection as Web Services.) With this setting enabled, the printer is visible to any number of HP cloud-based services, including Workforce Experience.
Note: HP also provides a tool, the MPS Printer Onboarding tool, to help you enable Web Services for multiple devices at once.
Once printers are connected to the HP cloud, they can be onboarded to Workforce Experience and become part of your managed fleet of printers.
Print Fleet Proxy connected printers: The Workforce Experience Print Fleet Proxy is middleware that sits between Workforce Experience and HP’s legacy print management solution, HP Web Jetadmin. A Print Fleet Proxy is installed on Web Jetadmin server and synchronizes information between the two solutions.
The Print Fleet Proxy addresses Web Jetadmin's lack of centralized management. While organizations might use multiple Web Jetadmin servers to manage printer subsets, administration is server-specific. Print Fleet Proxy connects these servers and their managed printers through the Workforce Experience portal, providing a unified interface.
Note: Connecting printers via Print Fleet Proxy allows printer management through either Workforce Experience or the Web Jetadmin tool. Bidirectional data sync ensures that configuration changes made in one system automatically update the other.
Use Cases
The following use cases illustrate how the HP Workforce Experience Platform (WXP) streamlines and enhances print management within an organization.
Scenario 1: Centralized Monitoring of Printer Status
Solution: An IT administrator needs a single view of the operational status of all printers across the organization. Using the WXP portal's dashboard widgets, the administrator can monitor real-time status indicators like online/offline status, paper levels, toner levels, and error messages for the entire printer fleet. This eliminates the need to check individual printer interfaces or rely on user reports, enabling proactive maintenance and reducing downtime.
Scenario 2: Standardizing Printer Security Configurations
Solution: The security team wants to enforce policies and consistent security settings across all network printers to mitigate potential vulnerabilities. Through the WXP portal, they can define security profiles that include settings such as access controls, firmware update policies, and encryption protocols. These profiles can then be applied to specific groups of printers, ensuring uniform security posture and simplifying compliance management.
Scenario 3: Generating Fleet-Wide Print Usage Reports
Solution: Management requires insights into printer usage patterns to optimize resource allocation and control printing costs. Using the WXP portal's reporting capabilities, an administrator can generate reports detailing print volumes by department, user, or device. These reports can help identify high-usage areas, underutilized printers, and potential cost-saving opportunities through policy adjustments or hardware reallocation.
Scenario 4: Proactive Identification of Printer Health Issues
Solution: The IT support team wants to identify and address potential printer issues before they impact users. By running health assessment reports in the WXP portal, they can proactively identify printers with performance issues, such as frequent paper jams, slow printing speeds, or connectivity problems. This allows for timely intervention, reducing user frustration and minimizing disruptions to workflows.
Scenario 5: Remote Troubleshooting and Configuration of Printers
Solution: A remote office is experiencing printing problems, and sending a technician on-site is time-consuming and costly. Using the WXP portal's remote remediation features, an IT administrator can remotely access the affected printer's configuration settings. This allows them to diagnose and resolve common issues, such as incorrect driver settings or network connectivity problems, without needing physical access to the device, thus improving response times and reducing support costs.
System Requirements and Limitations
Cloud-connected Printers System Requirements
Cloud-connected printers can only be associated with one HP account at a time. Onboarding fails if the printer is already linked to another account (personal or another tenant).
Currently, the platform incorrectly reports this as a cloud connection error (web services not enabled).
If you receive a cloud connection error for a powered-on, network-connected printer, it might be linked to another account. Disconnect the printer from the other account and then try onboarding it to Workforce Experience again.
Workforce Experience Print Fleet Proxy System Requirements
HP Web Jetadmin service
The Workforce Experience Print Fleet Proxy requires HP Web Jetadmin to be installed on the same PC. HP strongly recommends that you upgrade to the latest version of Web Jetadmin before installing Print Fleet Proxy.
Currently, HP is only testing the Print Fleet Proxy against HP Web Jetadmin 10.5 SR4. Although Print Fleet Proxy may work with earlier versions of HP Web Jetadmin, HP does not guarantee that all features will function as expected.
HP Workforce Experience Platform Access
The initial administrator account is setup by an HP Workforce Experience Partner when you subscribe to the service.
Note: Currently, adding admin or user accounts is not supported by the WXP platform. Until this feature is supported, please contact [email protected] to add new accounts to the service.
Server Hardware
The Web Jetadmin application is a resource-intensive service. To prevent performance issues, ensure the server hosting both HP Web Jetadmin and HP Fleet Proxy is robust and has adequate processor cores. See the recommended computing hardware specifications below.
In testing 2000 devices, HP found that the following baseline hardware specifications should be sufficient to produce acceptable performance results. If you find the performance slow or you are managing more than 2000 devices, you likely require a server with more computing power.
● 4 or more processor cores
● 2.8 GHz or higher processor speed
● 4 GB or more of RAM
● 4 GB of available storage
Network and Firewall Configuration
HP Fleet Proxy is an on-premise service that communicates with a cloud-based service. You must configure your firewall to permit inbound and outbound communication between the Web Jetadmin (WJA) server and WXP, either through DNS filtering or IP whitelisting.
DNS filtering: Configure your firewall to allow outbound HTTPS requests over port 443 to the following endpoints:
IP whitelisting: To whitelist IP addresses, you’ll need to include the IP address of every possible cloud server that HP Fleet Proxy may need to communicate with. You can find that list here.
Workforce Experience Print Fleet Proxy Limitations
Supported devices: The Workforce Experience Print Fleet Proxy has no limitations on the devices it supports; it supports all devices that are supported by HP Web Jetadmin 10.5 SR4. You can find the complete list here.
Supported Web Jetadmin features: The principal limitation of Print Fleet Proxy and HP Workforce Experience is the number of Web Jetadmin features that can be managed. With this early release, only a subset of Web Jetadmin features is supported. This number will increase with each subsequent HP Workforce Experience release as the platform is built out to manage more functionality.
For a complete list of settings currently supported by Print Fleet Proxy and HP Workforce Experience, see Supported settings in Managing Print with HP Workforce Experience.
Related Resources
For comprehensive information on leveraging WXP for print management, including policy implementation and reporting, consult the detailed documentation available here -
References
Contact Us
For any assistance, [create a support case] or email [email protected].