Printer Management

Overview:

Printer Management Solutions

The costs associated with business printers consist of more than just paper and ink. By adopting a printer management solution, businesses can gin visibility of the way that people are using the printers.

Printer management covers a multitude of subjects associated with printers, from the use of printer drivers and programs that allow users to connect their computers to a printer, to the way individual users interact with their printer.

Midshire has a team of IT specialists trained specifically to network our customers printers on-site at their premises. The Network team ensures that once a printer has been installed, it is fully connected to a company’s network. Each computer will have the right drivers downloaded, to ensure seamless printing and scanning. The network team also provide in-depth training to all staff on how to best use their new printing devices.

How will Printer Management benefit my business?

Research has found that organisations spend between 1% and 6% (Lexmark UK) of their annual revenue on photocopying and printing. By adopting a print management solution, business owners can see their entire print fleet output. There are a range of print management software packages available. Some can even show which department or individual, uses the printer the most. You can set restrictions to help reduce any unnecessary printing at an individual or departmental level. Restrictions on printing can include: limiting certain departments to only printing in black and white or enforcing duplex printing. You can also set budgets per user or remove the ability to print off emails.

Printer management can also help with data security issues. By implementing user authentication on your printer fleet, you can ensure that unclaimed print-outs are a thing of the past. This requires the user to identify themselves using their fingerprint, key-fob or password on the printer to release their prints. Many printouts contain confidential information and in the wrong hands, could result in huge problems. This is useful for ‘Follow-Me’ printing, where a user can collect their printing from any device on the network.

Do your employees work from their mobile or tablet? Printer management can allow users to integrate their mobile devices with the office printer or photocopier. This allows them to print straight from their phone or scan documents to their tablet.

Printer management is also hugely important at the end of your contract. Every scan and copy is saved on the hard-drive of your photocopier, which, if not wiped, could be passed onto another company. Midshire ensures that your hard-drive is wiped of all confidential material when it returns to our warehouse.

Printer Management Tools

Midshire offer a variety of printer management tools including: PaperCut MF and Equitrac.

PaperCut MF intercepts print jobs on the print server, analyses them and applies rules to enforce your print policies, for example, routing print jobs to the most appropriate printer, rejecting jobs with incorrect paper sizes or asking users to confirm single-sided printing. You can assign users with ‘credits’ so they are responsible for their printing activities. PaperCut is the most popular printer management tools for the Education Sector.

Equitrac is a more advanced printer management tool. It is an intelligent solution providing control over printer costs. This printer management tool reduces consumable usage by making users accountable for their print behaviour. It also increases document security by encrypting documents and storing them on a server.