New in NiceLabel Cloud

This new feature helps you automatically import your existing printer infrastructure into Control Center so you can centrally manage your printers. This feature is very useful when you have a lot of existing printers you want to import, but do not want to spend time manually adding them one by one.

Start by downloading an Excel template from Control Center. The template is based on your printing environment and includes the printer brands, models, driver profiles, groups, and port monitors you already have in your Control Center. You can add additional printer information like printer names, locations, and ports used.

Upload your complete Excel template and run Import from Excel. You see your status report and get notified about any problems.

The print management UI in Control Center displays features that currently logged-in users have access to, defined by their user Access Roles. Previously, users could see but not use features not granted to them. This release helps users understand what they can and cannot access.

For example, if your Access Role prevents you from installing new printers, but allows you to view licensed printers, you no longer see a printer installation button, but you can still see your list of licensed printers in use.

This release includes multiple code optimizations to improve the overall user experience in Control Center:

When you adjust driver preferences for your printers online in Control Center, you can now use sliders to set certain preferences. Sliders let you control your settings visually and improve on traditional drop-down controls by providing a much better visual user experience.

The Print Queues section displays registered print queues in your environment. You can see a list of all your printers and manage your printer queues with two new Columns and Filter buttons.

For example, you can display print queues for specific printer types or manufacturers, queues available on specific computers, or queues with current print jobs.

Driver profiles store your printer preferences like print speed and darkness. Applying driver profiles to your printers is useful when you frequently change your printer label media because you normally apply different printer preferences whenever your media changes.

Driver profiles are often similar for the same printers. This update saves you time re-configuring profiles by allowing you to copy existing profiles so you can quickly change a few preferences and save the copy as a new profile,

You can assign driver profiles you create to specific printers. This release allows you to select multiple printers and assign them the same driver profile in a single operation.

Your selected profile must match the brand of selected printers, or you see a warning message.

You can now save time by changing your preferred driver on multiple printers in a single operation. When you have multiple printers of the same manufacturer selected, you can set a preferred driver for them all. Control Center notifies computers in your environment that you changed your centralized settings and updates them to the new driver package.

Open Control Center > Users to see a list of all users configured in your system, manage your users, and define user privileges. This update adds two new fields to the data grid:

You can search for users by name or email address. You can also customize your view by adding one or more filters. For example, you can filter the view to display suspended users, filter by users whose last login was a month ago, or display only your organizational users, etc.

The Users view includes pagination so you can select how many items to show on each page.

Control Center features a new visual component to quickly find users and their email addresses. This component is useful when you want to send notification emails based on events that happen in Control Center.

Typically, you configure these email notifications for workflow changes and for alerting.

When you add users to your recipients list, a list of all your users appears. Use the search to quickly find users and press Enter to add the user to your recipients list. You can add multiple users to your list.

Your Control Center dashboard shows Computer running Automation and Your applications sections. When there are more than 8 items you now see page selection options.

Click the links to see all your computers running Automation or all your applications.

Previously, when you invited new users to your Control Center account, you had to provide names and email addresses.

Now, when you connect Control Center with your Azure Active Directory (AAD) for NiceLabel Cloud or Active Directory (AD) for NiceLabel on-premise, NiceLabel can read user email addresses from your user directory when you click Add User. This improvement saves you time and minimizes the risk of mistyping email addresses.

To invite external users to Control Center, you can still manually type their email addresses.

Control Center now gives you more insight into your users and their access roles. You can generate reports to list all access roles for any user as a downloadable Excel file.

While Control Center allows you to see which users are members of each access role, your report shows access role membership for each user. Go to Users > Access Roles to access this new report feature.

Control Center now allows your user groups to set access permissions for multiple users for web applications or Control Center itself. Instead of defining permissions for each user separately, all members of the group you select inherit access to resources granted to the group.

You can set properties for each group:

When you add a new group to Control Center, you can now also choose your group email and description.

There is a slight difference in Cloud and on-premise product group support:

Your list of users in Control Center now includes a Last login field for your users. You can also sort by last user login and see recently logged-in users or you can sort by last users who haven't recently logged in.

When you invite guest users to Control Center, they receive invitation emails with a link to sign up. Guest users you invite who don't sign up with this link show in Control Center with the status Not signed up.

If your guest user deletes or misplaces your invitation email and can't sign up, you can now click Send again to resend their invitation email.

If you need multiple similar access roles or a new access role similar to an existing access role, you can now duplicate existing access roles and make changes to your duplicates instead of creating new access roles from scratch.

Global variables are shared variables stored centrally in Control Center instead of on your label templates. Global variables have unique values for each print instance and are typically used as global counters. Control Center can reprint label templates that use global variables.

You have two operation modes:

You can now set your operation mode in your Control Center database system settings.

If an error occurs during trigger execution, the trigger icon turns red, the trigger receives an error status, and the event details get logged in the logging database. Even if all additional events complete successfully, the trigger remains in an error state until you confirm that you understand the error and want to clear the status. To acknowledge errors, click the icon next to the error counter under trigger details.

All error events in Automation logs are color-coded in red. When you expand a red-colored event, the action that failed within that event is also colored in red.

You can click the Copy Log button to copy the entire error message to the clipboard and use it in further analysis. If you need the entire log of the current trigger, you can click the Download button and download it as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

Control Center provides a new dialog to manage Automation configurations. What was previously available through button drop-down options are now displayed in a dialog box view.

You can narrow the display by filtering and grouping items by computer name or configuration name. When you click Add button to deploy a new configuration, a new dialog opens to select your configuration from Documents storage, then you select the target computer with NiceLabel Automation installed.

You can also Reload or Remove the configuration in this dialog.

On June 15, 2022, Microsoft will stop support for Internet Explorer 11. Loftware will stop supporting Internet Explorer 11 in NiceLabel 10.1.

After this date, you might encounter a degraded experience or be unable to connect to Control Center or Web Printing portal when using Internet Explorer 11 or using IE11 mode in Microsoft Edge. We recommend that you migrate to one of the browsers listed on the System Requirements page.

Also, see the announcement from Microsoft.

With the announced Loftware Print Server (LPS) retirement, NiceLabel Label Cloud or NiceLabel LMS (On-prem) are the possible upgrades to Loftware products that allow the continuance of the existing printing, optimization and process improvement.

NiceLabel Automation supports the TCP/IP socket interface of the Loftware Print Server (LPS) to deliver the print request files. Loftware WatchDog (WD) protocol handles communication. Your applications will deliver the payload the same way as with LPS, but NiceLabel Automation can be the backend server to process data and print labels.

When you add a new LPS trigger in Automation, it is already preconfigured with the Run command file action and needs no additional settings. You just deploy the trigger.

NiceLabel can process the PAS files data structure of Loftware Print Server (LPS) . These are print request files with a simple ASCII structure that has all the commands, variable names and values, and other data for the labels. The variable names in the file match the variables in the label file.

This functionality allows you to migrate the existing label-print integration based on LPS to NiceLabel. No changes are required in your existing business system, you only replace LPS with NiceLabel.

When you provide PAS files to NiceLabel, the file content is analyzed and the following information determined:

In NiceLabel, use the Run command file action to support the PAS print request files.

NiceLabel supports various types of command files as input to the Run Command File action. Command files provide a list of key-value pairs to print on a specified label template using the specified printer.

The latest improvement allows you to select the Auto option and let NiceLabel determine what kind of the command file Automation receives. For example, this new functionality works well for situations where you provide various types of command files as input to the same Automation trigger.

When using the Workday Cloud Print API you have to provide the data compliant with the XML schema. We have extended the XML schema with two additional fields for the Inventory_Label_Inventory_Locations structure.

We have strengthened the security around connecting your cloud-enabled printers to the NiceLabel cloud account. With the previous releases you could connect and use any cloud-enabled printer, now you can allow connection only from printers with a correct client certificate installed.

The Cloud Print API supports Zebra printer authentication using certificates. When a cloud printer opens a connection to the NiceLabel Cloud, the communication is only successful when your printer provides a valid certificate issued by the trusted certificate authority (CA). Each printer has a unique certificate that must contain a printer's unique identifier (e.g. the serial number).

The Administrator can enable cloud printer authentication in the Control Center and upload one or more trusted CAs. These CAs will in most cases be set up locally in the companies to issue self-signed certificates.

A new method SendData is available in the Cloud Print API to send the printer’s native commands and retrieve the response from the printer. You can use the new method to expand the range of communication possibilities with the printer. You are no longer limited by the restrictions of the built-in communication in the Cloud Print API. Now you can send your custom commands and queries to your printers and receive the responses.

For example, you use the new method to get the firmware version installed in the printer, the printer’s model name, the printer’s IP address, set printing settings, or restart the printer. You are only limited by the list of native commands the Zebra printer supports.

To respond to the requirements of the high-throughput printing scenarios, NiceLabel supports various optimization techniques, like using printer native objects, caching templates and data, or pre-loading label templates into printers.

Traditionally, you use the Store Label to Printer action to pre-load the label template. This action stores fixed objects and also provide placeholders for the dynamic content provided at print time.

With this release, NiceLabel extends support for its native XML payload to automate the pre-loading of label templates. The structure of the XML command file includes new elements. NiceLabel follows the directives within the received XML. You must provide the name of a label template, the memory location inside the printer, and optional default values for dynamic data.

NiceLabel Label Converter is a utility that converts label templates from other labeling software to NiceLabel format. You can automate the conversion process by controlling the actions of the Converter through command-line switches.

For example, you use NiceLabel Label Converted to convert Loftware LWL label templates (used in LLM/LPS) to Loftware NiceLabel NLBL label templates.

The following switches are available:

NiceLabel users connecting to an SAP HANA database server using the SAP HANA data provider might experience slow interaction with the server. The operations to query the database and retrieve records might take a long time.

The performance was also affected by schema information that was retrieved several times.

To resolve the problem, you can configure NiceLabel to request the schema information just once and then cache it for all subsequent requests within the session. There is a new configurable option Enable-Data-Table-Schema-Caching in the NiceLabel’s product.config configuration file.

The .NET API now exposes the information about the label orientation.

The ILabelSettings interface includes the new property Orientation with two possible values:

You can programmable access the content in the Document Storage and manipulate it. A frequently used method is List to get a list of items from a specified folder.

The List method in the Document API supports a new parameter ItemType. It allows you to specify the type of items you want to get back from the selected folder:

The method is also documented in the Development Portal here: https://developerportal.onnicelabel.com/docs/services/document-api-1/operations/List_GetDocumentItems

The List method requires the Id parameter through which you provide the folder name from which you need a list of items. In previous versions, you always had to provide the id for the root folder (which is hardcoded to value 1).

With the 10.1. release, you no longer have to provide the value of “Id” when requesting items from the root folder.

You can use the new method to download the whole content of the folder. You must provide the folder “Id” and you will receive a list of file names and their content in a response.