IT inside HP (part 2)

We are continuing our action-blocking series on how the IT infrastructure is organized within HP. In the last series, you learned that for 1,500 of our employees, there are only 2 IT specialists, and that we have been successfully putting on IT outsourcing for a long time on ourselves.

This time we will talk about what most people think of when they think about HP — printers and laptops. More precisely about how we ourselves use our own products. Let's start with the printers.

Print always, print everywhere

Last October, the Moscow office of HP moved into a new building. Three floors in the business center "Metropolis" - the triumph of modern ideas about the working space. And one of the most useful innovations - printers now live separately from people in small fenced compartments. Each compartment is located so that from any workplace did not have to go to him further than 30 meters.

To print something, just look at the IP address that is written on the printer, and enter it in the settings window of the universal driver for HP printers. Mobile employees, of which we have many, can thus in no way restrict themselves to freedom of movement.
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The office is dominated by top models of the LaserJet M4345 and LaserJet 5550 - workhorses designed for heavy loads. In addition to them, there are LaserJet M9040 / M9050 and the “popular-brand” LaserJet 4700 . But the most interesting are HP CM8060 inkjet with Edgeline technology. Their print head is A4-page wide, so that the MFP can produce a page in one pass of the head. The average speed is 60 pages per minute for black and white and 50 for color printing. Watching this beast shoot big color posters for our information boards - this is a sight to see!

In the new office, small printers have practically disappeared, which were previously held by some departments and employees. Therefore, now if in one of the large machines the cartridge runs out, after a few minutes, the exclamations of despair begin to come from all the surrounding cubes (all our employees are in a hurry, as I already mentioned). But it happens very rarely, because every printer in the office all the time is in the palm of our administrative and economic department. Helps them in this free package JetAdmin . My art sketch below illustrates working with him.


Scene "JetAdmin: administrators monitor the level of consumables in office printers"

Paper jams ... you can not even mention them, because they are solved very simply. It is even interesting if you like to open the covers of complex devices.

By the way, all the printers in the office are set up to print on both sides of the paper by default - we care about the environment and want to make our world cleaner. Also, to reduce paper consumption, as already mentioned in the previous post, a very large document flow is translated into electronic form.

The cycle of laptops in nature

On the New Year in December, we traditionally honor old-time employees. And now, almost 100 people have worked at HP Russia for over 5 years. How can a person, whose laptop has worked for 3-4 years according to the instructions, can get a replacement?

First of all, he will not be allowed to forget about the retirement age of his silicon friend. An automatic letter will ask to be handed over to the IT department (unfortunately, although in Europe and the USA the old computer is almost completely recycled, in Russia it is almost impossible). After that, the employee can receive a new computer, which he must select in advance from the list of available (and then track his path from the factory to the local IT or mail room).


But often the laptop does not have to be discharged from the factory (our factory near St. Petersburg will open only this year, so the closest one is on the other side of customs). If an employee leaves the company, his laptop will wait for the new owner.

Conveniently, even if an employee goes on a business trip to Australia, and his computer there becomes a victim of a dingo dog, he can be given a new HP office. Accounting of working machines is conducted globally, by serial numbers.

The park of laptops and desktops within the company is limited to several models, to simplify the work of the support service. Mobile employees, as a rule, receive compact business laptops with fast processors, a capacious battery and all common interfaces for accessing the Web. Employees employed in office work receive machines with large screens, comfortable keyboards and a docking station.

But on all computers a single operating system image is installed, always available for download and constantly updated. It includes drivers for the entire PC fleet, office software, diagnostic and service utilities, software for various types of communication with colleagues. You can update or install new software from the corporate repository using the Self-Service Manager client.

By the way, the PC Forecast utility prompted me that my laptop is already 3.4 years old and I can apply for a replacement in a month. But I will not, because we are akin to him. Well, also because all the resource-intensive tasks are more pleasant for me to do on my desktop with Core Quad :)

To be continued ... with you

We will not once again return to how we apply our own ideas and creations inside HP. Want to know more? Ask! But much more interesting stories are born there, in the fields, with our customers and partners. So while I continue to write about them.