What are we cutting from the budget?

Print Management is a Necessity.
What is Print Management? Why would you manage printing? Good questions in a corporate environment where budgets soar and user’s printing, is ignored for the good of production. But more and more this is becoming a major concern.
Printing was cheap and easy when there were just black and white simple line printers around, but the technologies in printing have come a long way. The push to upgrade to color printers is huge, and when your basic toner cartridge on a color printer goes up in price 3 to 5 times you start to see the budget disappear. Paper also was a negligible expense, but since the introduction to color and being able to print photographs, transparencies, and other specialized output the price of paper has also eaten into budgets.
So let’s summarize this, printer technology has jumped leaps and bounds in the last 10 years. The hardware is smaller, faster, cheaper, and you can print color. So the market had to compensate in other places like the price of toner, paper, services, etc. While the technology has jumped far ahead for the print industry the management of these systems has not.
Walk into any small business, school, corporation or government office and you will see boxes under each printer. What’s in these; scrap paper, No! It is not just scrap paper; those boxes also contain valuable Toner, Help Desk time, IT Administrator time, and many other service expenditures. Hence the budget disappears.
The paperless office (Digital Age) came and is still around. But we still want to print and we can print on-demand! We print E-mail, Websites, Office Documents, Child’s Book Report, Resumes, Photographs, Transparencies, Posters, Books, and on and on.
Microsoft, Novell, Linux, and other operating systems do not emphasize on any type of print management in general. Individual print manufactures have come out with their own software which falls short of a real solution, and will only work with their own hardware. This won’t work for your average company as most, according to a recent survey have mixed printer brands.
The average company may be, aware or completely unaware of this huge expenditure, and needlessly throws away money, and resources that could be better spent.
Recently a survey was done on IT Managers at 954 organizations around the world; found the biggest problem with their printing networks was:
Printing Waste (56%)
Inability to Do Accounting for Printing (41%)
Other categories of problems included inability to control print jobs and other complaints.
There are other bigger problems that companies face today like the economy, hostile takeovers, layoffs, security, personnel; Print Management may appear like a small problem, but you would be surprised!
Print Management Solution
So what is the solution to mange your printing infrastructure? Print Manager Plus from Software Shelf handles these concerns. Print Manager Plus allows an organization to analyze printing traffic by user, group, or even printer. The product incorporates Crystal Reports allowing for a full audit trail of all print jobs on your network. The product is software based and uses the existing Microsoft Windows Server operating system to monitor your existing network printer setup.
This is very helpful as there would be no change in the way your users print and no change in your current network setup. No hardware is needed or added in the installation and implementation of the product which is seamless.
Installation:
Print Manager Plus is licensed on your print server running Microsoft Windows NT/2000/2003 Server even with a cluster setup, or if you have a peer to peer network it could be loaded on a Windows NT/2000/XP Workstation or just a plain file/print server. On the server where you have installed Print Manager Plus, you would have you shared printers. Print Manager Plus uses Install Shield and it is a seamless install which takes a couple of minutes.
The product defaults to a Microsoft Access database, which is good for a single print server with a low printing load. (About 750 print jobs a day) It is suggested you use a local MSDE if you are printing more than this (more than 750 print jobs a day), and if you have multiple print servers or if you cluster your servers you would use an SQL database. (Good for unlimited printing traffic) The database options are great for business’ that do not own a full copy of SQL. MSDE is free and most have MS Access. Check out this webpage on the Microsoft site for MSDE: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/msde/
Implementation:
Once the install is finished the product shows up on you start menu and can be opened. The product automatically pulls your Users, User Groups, and Printers from Active directory. The interface is easy to navigate as each of these areas is defined by a tab.
The product comes with a manual that walks you right through the installation and then on to the initial setup. You can start monitoring print jobs right away using a default value of all print jobs as 5 cents per page or you can add a more defined value to printers by page size, grayscale, color, and even discount for duplex printing. There is also an option to monitor Large Format Printers by inch or by Metric values.
Once the values have been defined on the printer it is time to setup your users tracking options. There are three lines of defense on cutting back printing or at the very least having a full conceptual understanding of your printing infrastructure.
By clicking on a User or User Group you can set printing to Unlimited which is just monitoring all printing. The next step is Quotas which can be set as a default on a user or group of users. The quota can be scheduled to automatically reset or increase by a defined dollar amount by day, week, or month. If setting hard quotas on your users is not your cup of tea, then the simple restrictions that can be set may be.
The restrictions can be set on a user or group or the printer itself. The first restriction is: Deny printing for jobs over # of pages. The second is Deny printing for jobs over # of bytes, KB, or MB. The third restriction, my favorite is Deny printing based on the document title. Here you can enter word values or strings like; .html, cnn, espn, .gif, www.mapquest.com. The forth is pretty simple, Deny printing if the job is color. These restrictions should really work in any environment and definitely will cut back any wasted printing.
Now if the User hits a restriction or quota you can setup an editable pop-up message to be sent. You can also have the print job in question automatically be Deleted or Paused.
Administration:
Print Manager Plus has a remote Administration interface that can be loaded on any Windows NT/2000/XP workstation. All administration of the product can be done from this. Also the Admin is free of charge, so you can have multiple copies running. If you have a large enterprise there is a servers tab which allows you to see all of your print servers and edit your license keys.
Reporting:
Print Manager Plus incorporates Crystal Reports. The 25 pre-made reports cover Detailed, Summarized, and graphs, showing printing by user, groups, printers, and workstations.
The reports store detailed printing information such as; time printed, username, document name, Grayscale/Color/Duplex, # of pages, Job Cost, Average Cost, Total Cost. There is even a report on Denied Printing which is a great way to see how much savings are being reaped by running the software.
The reports can be exported in many different formats, including PDF, Excel, HTML, CSV, TEXT, RTF, DBF, etc.
Another interesting find was being able to see the entire printing infrastructure. Being able to see all of the printers on you network can lead to inventory control and flow of printing. You could pull lesser used printers from one area and send them to another. You could get rid of more expensive printers or restrict certain color printers. All of the information collected by Print Manager Plus could be used in many different ways to help reduce IT services and raise company personnel production levels.
Other Product Details:
According to Software Shelf Print Manager Plus grew out of the Academic market. This would make sense as schools have restrictive budgets and this would be a perfect tool for them. It then caught on in the corporate and government markets, which they then added on a software based client billing module for the professional services industries such as; law, architectural, real estate, graphics, etc.
The product really comes in two different versions, Print Manager Plus Standard for Corporate, Academic, Government, and Print Manager Plus with Client Billing for Professional Services, there is even a Traveling license edition for printer salesman/consultants, how ironic!
The product also has a free web based, or application End User Inquiry Tool which installs on a Windows NT/2000/XP workstation and allows the user to see how much they have printed, and what their quota is. All of the installs support SMS and the product has been approved to use “Verified for Windows 2003 Server” and “Designed for Windows XP” Microsoft logos. Software Shelf touts being able to track 99.9% of all printers ever manufactured and its technology is 100% software based needing no additional hardware or network changes to make it work.
Summary:
Print Manager Plus does the job. The product is an easy to install and easy to use solution that every Administrator should have installed on their network. The product is super flexible and can be installed on a small peer to peer network or a large server enterprise infrastructure. The product is fairly priced and starts at $795.00 per print server for the Standard edition and $1,295.00 for the Client Billing edition with large discounts for Academic and non-profit institutions. A fully functional 30 day evaluation can be downloaded from http://www.softwareshelf.com/
bio = Software Shelf strives to provide each customer with high quality sales assistance, customer service and technical support. In addition to our own line of printer management software, we distribute other “best of breed” Windowsr 95/98/NT/2000/XP/2003 products.


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