[en] New in NiceLabel Cloud

[en] NiceLabel Cloud Designer is a new edition in the NiceLabel Cloud product line, providing label design, file storage, and print capabilities from the cloud. Offered as a Software as a Service (SaaS) product, NiceLabel Cloud Designer allows you to use the cloud-based app over the Internet. Your account is always available to connect to from any device or location. SaaS also ensures automatic platform upgrades – your system is always up to date with newly released functionality.

[en] The subscription to NiceLabel Cloud Designer is running on top of the Microsoft Azure platform providing reliable and secure operations. NiceLabel Cloud uses modern data encryption communication protocols for privacy and data integrity. Your account is available as an online self-serviceable subscription that gives you an overview of your options and allows you to manage the printer add-ons online by yourself.

[en] There are two main components to your NiceLabel Cloud Designer account. The NiceLabel Control Center is the main browser-based dashboard for labeling activities. Here is where you will store your labeling files, see your printer seats, and quickly and simply initiate printing. This is a portal you would use as the cloud service.

[en] You design your label templates with the NiceLabel Designer application. This is a design application specifically developed with label templates in mind. You can use standard objects, such as text boxes, shapes, and images, and labeling-specific objects, such as barcodes and 2D codes. The Designer supports all major barcode types for stocking, kitting, shipping, or other labeling requirements. Using a professional tool for labeling mitigates the risk of producing non-compliant labels and label rejects because of their poor quality.

[en] The Designer works with professional label printers and supports all other printer types. Connecting to various data sources and applying different data to the same label template minimizes the need to duplicate label templates. You can print one single label template each time with different data.

[en] When it comes to printing, all you need is a browser and an Internet connection to the NiceLabel Cloud. You can open Control Center in your browser and then navigate to the label template you want to print—the preview of the selected label shows on-screen. Then you can choose the printer from the list of available printers in your environment and start to print.

[en] You can create any label template with NiceLabel Designer, from basic labeling needs (address labels, name tags, or business cards) to more complex product or shipping labels, and even labels for regulated environments (food & nutrition labels, hazard labels, dangerous goods labels, etc.).

[en] Your NiceLabel Cloud Designer account is available with pre-designed samples for the frequently used labeling and marking tasks, such as product or shipping labels. You can use these sample labels as they are, or customize them for your specific requirements. For example, add your logotype or change the object positioning.

[en] Loftware and your labeling partner/vendor provide you with the sample labels. Your partner maintains a close relationship with you, knows your labeling pains, and can help you by including relevant samples in your NiceLabel Cloud Designer subscription. To use the sample labels, you must first copy them from read-only repositories into your account. You can copy them from within the Document tab or the main Dashboard.

[en] NiceLabel Designer makes it easy to create and maintain your labels. Your labels can be designed with static content or dynamic content when you connect label objects to data sources.

[en] You can print labels from your existing data sources, such as Excel, Excel Online, Google Sheets, or databases. When you use a dynamic design approach versus the label design with static (fixed) content, you minimize the number of variants for your label templates. You can print one label template with different values on each print run (think about it as running a mail merge in Microsoft Word).

[en] NiceLabel Designer creates printer-independent label templates. Even if you create the label template for a specific printer brand, you can print to any other printer in your environment, for which you have the printer driver installed. NiceLabel software supports more than 5,000 printer models. You can download the drivers from the Loftware web page.

[en] You can also print labels to any other printer that is not supported by NiceLabel directly. In this case, NiceLabel will use your existing Windows printer driver that came with your printer.

[en] You can initiate label printing from Control Center in your browser. The modern user interface provides a rich set of options to find your label template, preview it on-screen, and print it to your printers.

[en] NiceLabel Cloud sends the print request to a NiceLabel on-premises workstation to generate a print job and send it into the Windows Spooler of the locally installed printer driver. You can print to any printer available at any location, even if some printers are installed in remote sites or geographical locations, or even to printers outside of your organization. For some requirements, you might want to offload label printing to external service providers.

[en] Each printer you own requires a license to print a label. Your account supports a specific number of concurrent printers. If you ever need to support additional printers, you can easily add new printer seats to your account in the online subscription portal.

[en] NiceLabel Cloud Designer is an entry-level cloud offering from Loftware. If your labeling requirements increase because of your business expansion, a new field of operations, or simply because of changing your manual printing processes into automated ones, there is a better match with more powerful NiceLabel Cloud tiers:

[en] The upgrade path from NiceLabel Cloud Designer is comfortable. Your current subscription seamlessly upgrades to the new tier. All existing assets and configurations stay in place, and your account has new options and abilities unlocked for use.

[en] Each NiceLabel Cloud Designer has a predefined folder structure in the Documents tab that can be immediately applied to your projects.

[en] One of your first tasks will be to move existing labeling assets scattered on your local drives to Documents. This will be the basis of your centralized asset management. Use the existing folders “Labels,” “Graphics,” and “Database” to move appropriate files from the on-premises storage location. For example, store label templates (NLBL files) in the “Labels” folder.

[en] You can store all labeling assets in the same folder. However, a good practice is to store files of a similar type together in the same folder. This helps with the organization and visibility of your files.

[en] Moving all your assets into the cloud allows you to share them with your team members and ensures your labels are available at print time.

[en] All printers that you intend to use for label printing require a printer seat – a license. The printer occupies its printer seat as soon as you print a label on it. If you run out of licenses, you can easily add new printer seats in the online subscription portal and have the seats available within minutes.

[en] To make sure the important production printers are always available for printing, you can reserve such printers. The Control Center displays a list of all printers available in your environment, and you can reserve any of them. The printer seat is permanently associated with the printer, ensuring that printing to such a printer never fails. You can also release a printer seat from the reserved printer when you no longer need that printer.

[en] The Documents tab in Control Center is where you work with your labeling assets – the files you need for label printing, mainly label templates and images. With this release, a “card view” type of display has been added. You can choose between the list view and card view to represent the content of the selected folder.

[en] You can switch between list and card view by clicking the buttons in the action row grid. The number of cards in a row depends on the space available in the grid. Thumbnails are responsive and shrink or stretch to fill the area.

[en] In card view, you can also select multiple files at the same time with the mouse or keyboard operations. When using a mouse, there is a useful shortcut to surround cards with a selection rectangle – anything within a selection rectangle is selected.

[en] In NiceLabel Cloud products, the user authentication is not handled by the NiceLabel Cloud platform but by external authentication providers, such as Microsoft Azure AD. Before the Microsoft identity platform can authorize you to access the NiceLabel Cloud, the NiceLabel Cloud must be granted the privileges it needs to look up the user data at Microsoft. This one-time task requires a user with elevated permissions to perform it. We use the Microsoft Graph API to link NiceLabel Cloud with Microsoft Azure AD.

[en] With this release, NiceLabel Cloud requires less demanding permissions to read data from your Microsoft Azure AD than before. To process the user login, NiceLabel Cloud only reads the bare minimum of all user information from the directory it needs. We use more restrictive methods User.ReadBasic.All and GroupMember.Read.All.

[en] When you use label printers capable of printing on both sides of the media, it’s easy to create a matching double-sided label template in NiceLabel Designer. When you print a label from any desktop NiceLabel component, both sides of the label are visible in the label preview.

[en] The functionality of previewing both sides of a double-sided label is now also available in the cloud print form. When you open a label preview, you see both sides displayed on-screen at the same time.

[en] When user authentication is needed in NiceLabel, the sign-in will be completed using the browser installed on your PC. 

[en] In the previous releases, NiceLabel used the embedded browser. This became deprecated due to security incompatibility with the Google SSO method.

[en] It's necessary to sign in when you activate your desktop NiceLabel components against your NiceLabel Cloud account, if you haven’t used NiceLabel Control Center in a while, or when you sign in to your NiceLabel Web Client.

[en] When you enable electronic signature in the workflow approval processes in the Control Center, the users must re-authenticate before they can proceed with the important task (such as digitally approving a file). However, an electronic signature is only available when you use a Microsoft authentication provider - when you sign in with your Microsoft account or have linked your Control Center with your Microsoft Azure AD.

[en] The electronic signature is only available when you use Microsoft authentication. The Control Center provides this information on-screen.

[en] S/4-BC-XOM / BC-XOM provides external output management systems (OMS) with an open, generic interface to the SAP S/4HANA, SAP ERP, and SAP NetWeaver spool system. The BC-XOM interface offloads the preparation, conversion, and spooling to the external systems. Loftware NiceLabel becomes the external OMS for print job processing and printing with the standard status-reporting functionality back into the SAP spool system.

[en] When using Loftware NiceLabel as your OMS, you transfer the print process and the entire label template design and management into the new OMS. The label templates (forms) are designed and edited at a central point of administration. They are available to users based on their role-based access-control settings in the NiceLabel system. The label templates in NiceLabel are printer-agnostic. You create them once and print them to any target printer providing identical output on each device. In NiceLabel, creating a dynamic label with barcode objects, text objects with word wrapping, scaling images, or data encoding structures (such as GS1) is straightforward.

[en] The label and printer determination business rules remain under your control in SAP, guaranteeing that the correct layout is automatically selected according to the process or the desired output channel.

[en] Job tracking is available from the second the job is sent until it arrives as paper output. NiceLabel uses its centralized Web dashboard to supervise and control the complete output management system. The complete print history is stored on the NiceLabel side for each job, including details such as the name of the label template, printer used, timestamp of the print operation, data for all key-value pairs used on the printed label, and the graphical label preview. Simultaneously, an RFC callback is also made to the SAP spooler providing the status information about each submitted job. In case of errors, a detailed error helps the responsible person determine the root cause and find a solution.

[en] The “LPS trigger” type in NiceLabel Automation supports the WatchDog protocol from the Loftware LPS product. It was added in 10.2 for seamless migration to the NiceLabel platform for the users of LPS integrations. This trigger type was previously available only to specific solution IDs or license types but is now generally available in NiceLabel Automation Enterprise or above product levels.