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[en] Web-based printer management

[en] Import multiple printers with Excel

[en] 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.

Note

[en] As a prerequisite, you must have all appropriate driver packages already installed and available in Control Center.

Bulk_adding_printers_using_an_Excel_file-Import.png

[en] 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.

Bulk_adding_printers_using_an_Excel_file-Excel.png

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

[en] Print management UI only displays user-accessible features

[en] 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.

[en] 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.

[en] Speed optimizations

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

  • [en] Driver package replacements. Previously, creating a provisioning task to replace a driver package on your computer required sending multiple queries to the SQL Server. Now, optimized queries require only a single call to the SQL Server and drastically improve performance.

  • [en] Bulk printer reservations. When you reserve multiple printers at once to make sure they always have dedicated license seats available, the operation now completes in a fraction of the time. For example, reserving a few hundred printers previously took tens of seconds and now completes in only a few seconds.

  • [en] Printer availability checks. Internal printer availability processes now run in parallel with increased throughput. These processes report available printers (so users only see printers assigned to them) and printer statuses (live states and print queue statuses). Improvements are dramatic for large printing environments. For example, previously a computer with 1000 printers took minutes to report them to Control Center, now this process takes only seconds.

[en] Improved UI clarity

  • [en] Better printer installation wizard messages. Including improved text clarity and readability and more relevant printer provisioning information. Important messages now include “Learn more” links with additional descriptions to increase your understanding.

  • [en] Icons with task statuses. Standard success or failure icons appear next to provisioning tasks for quicker final task status identification.

  • [en] More details for timed-out provisioning operations. Failed provisioning operations provide additional descriptions for error states so you can understand which error prevented the operation.

  • [en] Live provisioning task statuses. When you submit a printer provisioning task, Control Center continuously refreshes the task status display to keep you informed on progress. Live statuses are possible because NiceLabel continuously provides task updates on your computers.

    Better_clarity_of_the_user_interface.png

[en] Slider UI elements in printing preferences

[en] 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.

Support_for_sliders__UI_element__in_the_printer_preferences.png

[en] New print queue display and filters

[en] 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.

  • [en] Choose which columns you want to see.

  • [en] Filter your list to only show print queues that match your criteria.

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

A_new_way_of_displaying_and_filtering_print_queues.png

[en] Duplicate driver profiles

[en] 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.

[en] 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,

[en] Apply driver profiles to multiple printers

[en] 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.

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

[en] Change the preferred driver for multiple printers

[en] 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.

Changing_preferred_driver_for_multiple_printers.png

[en] Redesigned Control Center UI

[en] Our Control Center user interface redesign continues to improve, with modernized pages built on the responsive Angular framework. Updated pages for this release include:

  • [en] Integrations > Automation

  • [en] Integrations > Cloud integrations

  • [en] Applications

  • [en] Users, Groups, and Access roles

  • [en] Password settings (for on-premise products)

[en] Users view improvements

[en] 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:

  • [en] Last login. This field shows how long has passed since users last logged in.

  • [en] Type. This field identifies user account types, whether an organizational user from your AAD or AD, or a guest user from an external organization.

The_Users_view_provides_more_data.png

[en] 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.

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

[en] Select users quickly in workflows and alerts

[en] 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.

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

A_new_visual_component_to_select_the_user_in_workflows_and_alerts.png

[en] 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.

[en] Dashboard UI improvements

[en] 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.

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

User_interface_improvements_in_the_Dashboard.png

[en] New and improved functionalities

[en] Quickly invite new AD or AAD users

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

[en] 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.

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

Simplified_procedure_to_invite_a_new_AD_or_AAD_user.png

[en] Generate user access role membership reports

[en] 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.

[en] 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.

Simplified_procedure_to_invite_a_new_AD_or_AAD_user.png

[en] Set access permissions with user groups

[en] 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.

[en] You can set properties for each group:

  • [en] Web applications. Web applications that members of the current group can access and run.

  • [en] Access roles. Access roles with permissions the group members inherit. Access roles define user permissions in Control Center.

    Note

    [en] “Allow” permissions take precedence over “deny” permissions. When one access role denies access to functionality, but the other allows it, your user can access that functionality.

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

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

  • [en] Group support for NiceLabel Cloud products. You can use groups when you link your NiceLabel Cloud account with your Azure Active Directory (AAD) and then select your AAD groups from Control Center.

  • [en] Group support for NiceLabel LMS products. You can use groups for application users (you can manually add application users to the new group) or Active Directory (AD) users (you can select your AD groups from Control Center).

[en] See last user login information

[en] 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.

img-01_last_login.png

[en] Resend guest user invitation emails

[en] 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.

[en] 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.

Resending_invitation_email_for_Guest_users.png

[en] Duplicate access roles

[en] 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.

Duplicating_access_roles.png

[en] Reprint labels with global variables

[en] 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.

[en] You have two operation modes:

  1. [en] Keep the original values of global variables from the original print. Original values reprint by default.

  2. [en] Use the current (new) values of global variables.

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

[en] Acknowledge Automation trigger errors

[en] 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.

Acknowledging_errors_in_the_list_of_Automation_triggers.png

[en] Automation server activity log improvements

[en] 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.

[en] 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.

Improved_log_of_activities_from_Automation_servers.png

[en] Manage Configurations dialog in Integrations

[en] 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.

[en] 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.

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

Manage_Configurations_dialog_for_integrations.png

[en] Internet Explorer is no longer supported

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

[en] 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.

[en] Also, see the announcement from Microsoft.

[en] Enhanced integrations

[en] LPS trigger

[en] 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.

[en] 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.

LPS_trigger.png

[en] 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.

Note

[en] You need NiceLabel Cloud Business or NiceLabel LPS Enterprise (or higher) to use the LPS trigger. The trigger must also be enabled through your license.

[en] PAS file support

[en] 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.

[en] 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.

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

  • [en] Which label template to print

  • [en] What data to place in the label template

  • [en] Label quantity

  • [en] Target printer

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

Note

[en] Before consuming PAS files in NiceLabel, you must convert Loftware Label Management LWL files into NiceLabel NLBL format. Label Converter is available to automate the task.

[en] Autodetecting the type of the command file

[en] 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.

[en] 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.

Autodetecting_the_type_of_the_command_file.png

[en] Workday API supports new XML schema

[en] 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.

  • [en] /Inventory_Label_Inventory_Locations/Inventory_Location_Data/Item_Inventory_Attributes/Defult_Issue_UOM

  • [en] /Inventory_Label_Inventory_Locations/Inventory_Location_Data/Item_Descriptor/Legacy_Item_Number

[en] Cloud printer authentication with a client certificate

Note

[en] Zebra printers support client certificates.

[en] 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.

[en] 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).

Cloud_printer_authentication_with_a_client_certificate.png

[en] 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.

Note

[en] NiceLabel Cloud doesn't handle the creation and deployment of certificates to the printers.

[en] Sending native commands to the printer using the Cloud Print API

Note

[en] Zebra printers support native command sending.

[en] 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.

[en] 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.

[en] Automating storing label templates to printers

[en] 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.

[en] 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.

[en] 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.

Exemple 1. [en] Example

[en] <nice_commands>

[en] <label name="label.nlbl" close="false">

[en] <!--job_name (optional) can be used to set the job name seen in printer spooler and alter the name under which the label is stored on the printer (store_name overrides this name). -->

[en] <!--store_name (optional) if set then this is the name under which the label is stored on the printer.-->

[en] <!--store_variant is the name of the storage in which the label is stored on the printer.-->

[en] <store_job store_name="label" store_variant="DRAM" printer="Zebra R-402" job_name="job1234567">

[en] <!-- These are the default values in case in recall the variable values are missing so these values are used. -->

[en] <variable name="variable1">1</variable>

[en] <variable name="variable2">2</variable>

[en] <variable name="variable3">3</variable>

[en] </store_job>

[en] </label>

[en] </nice_commands>


[en] Command-line switches in the NiceLabel Label Converter

[en] 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.

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

[en] The following switches are available:

  • [en] /SILENT and /VERYSILENT: Install the Converter in unattended mode

  • [en] NiceLabel-LabelConverter.exe sourceFolder destinationFolder: Select the source folder with original label templates and the destination folder, where the converted label templates will be saved.

[en] Improved performance connecting to SAP HANA database

[en] 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.

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

[en] 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.

[en] Label orientation is exposed in the .NET API interface

[en] The .NET API now exposes the information about the label orientation.

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

  • [en] 1 = Portrait

  • [en] 2 = Landscape

[en] Document API

[en] Support for the item type when listing folder content

[en] 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.

[en] 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:

  • [en] NULL – return all items

  • [en] File – return items of type “file”

  • [en] Folder – return items of type “folder”

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

[en] Shortcut to referencing a root folder

[en] 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).

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

[en] Download all files from the specified folder

[en] 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.

Note

[en] You will only receive the content of the specified folder, not the data from subfolders.