Superintendents, campus IT, and administrative teams must work together to maximize budgets while managing printing proactively to deliver a secure, accessible print environment for everyone on campus. This is where a Print Management solution becomes a valuable asset.
Mark Twain has this funny quote about a teacher’s first day back in the classroom.
“Describing her first day back in grade school after a long absence, a teacher said, ‘It was like trying to hold 35 corks underwater at the same time.’” IT administrators on campus might often feel the same.
In today’s schools, the tests they endure to create a print environment that is equally accessible, secure, and cost-effective are anything but standardized. In other words, K-12 campuses have unique printing challenges beyond your standard office, where printed documents remain an everyday necessity.
First, consider the devices. Students have Chromebooks. Teachers have tablets, administrators have PCs, and guests come in with their smartphones. And guess what… they all want to print from their chosen device. The BYOD brigade marches through schools every day.
Second, consider the reporting. Accurately tracking print-related costs is important to schools for obvious budget reasons. More so, many of the grants that schools would apply for require them to show the numbers when it comes to ALL expenses… print included.
Third, consider the physical geography. Multiple campuses around town, multiple buildings, hallways, classrooms, and administrative offices to navigate across each campus. Then consider the hodge-podge of printer models spread like ants, and the task of managing consumables, and deploying print drivers across the district.
The fact is that superintendents, campus IT, and administrative teams must work together to maximize budgets while managing printing proactively to deliver a secure, accessible print environment for everyone on campus. This is where a Print Management solution becomes a valuable asset.
5 Reasons Print Management is Essential in K-12 Education.
1. Gain print visibility.
You can’t improve what you can’t first measure and evaluate.
With tools associated with Print Management solutions like Canon’s uniFLOW or PaperCut, schools can track who is printing, and what they’re printing, and produce reports that give them visual evidence of their print costs. The ability to track, assess, and chargeback all printing, copying, scanning, and faxing costs on any enabled device is key to discovering real savings.
2. Free up your IT teams.
If teachers are the shining stars of the classroom, IT teams are the set directors and stage crew that work diligently behind the scenes to ensure all tools (including print) are performing as they should. Let’s face it, deploying printer drivers and managing print servers and devices is a time-exhausting gig.
Imagine a scenario where, with universal driver management, you have one print driver for every student, teacher, and administrator that can be deployed without a walkup to every device.
With Print Management, IT teams benefit from an instant overview of every enabled device in their location, including media and toner levels. The system can be configured to send out change-of device status notifications. Customized workflows can also be created for a range of status changes including device error, out of paper, or out of toner.
3. Meet today’s BYOD demand.
In today's classroom, students are on the move, and they're taking their tablets and mobile devices with them.
With remote printing via smartphone or tablet, regardless of their physical location, your users can leverage their compatible smartphones or tablets to submit and release their print jobs in a managed setting. Whatever the preferred method your user chooses to submit a job, it will appear in their personal Secure Print queue, they’ll be accounted for, and charged back correctly.
Additionally, with guest email and printing, your temporary user will receive an email containing a temporary job code for authentication at the device, offering an easy way to print presentations, curriculum, or other documents securely.
4. Recover and cut costs.
No one likes wasteful spending, but print can easily become a free-for-all if unchecked.
Implementing print policies such as double-sided printing, color restrictions, print job authorization, budgets, and feature restrictions helps cut costs almost immediately.
With least-cost job routing, IT administrators can restrict small print jobs to be routed to smaller desktop laser printers while directing larger jobs to be rerouted to faster more cost-effective MFPs. High-color volume is expensive. Route these jobs to more appropriate, cost-effective devices or restrict them altogether.
5. Ensure print security and document security.
Eliminating security risks is of utmost concern on campuses today under a variety of scenarios, including network security, MFP security, and document security. What security features is your school incorporating? Increase security, and prevent unauthorized access, through multiple authentication methods via Print Management.
With a solution like uniFLOW, users must be physically standing at a printer to release any print job. To prevent unauthorized use of devices, users are required to authenticate themselves at the device using a card login, username/password, PIN code, job code, anonymous login, or a combination of these options. This helps mitigate security threats and better protect sensitive data.
Trying to hold 35 corks underwater at the same time? Frustrated by free-for-all print practices? Datamax can help you fully understand and implement a relevant Print Management strategy, and make it an essential component to your strategic business plan. Ready to learn more? Click to schedule your visit with a Datamax Print Management Specialist!
