PaperCut For Education

Overview:

PaperCut For Education

Originally designed for schools and universities, PaperCut helps education establishments of all sizes save money by tracking and controlling staff and student printing. Schools can make a significant reduction in their printing output by employing a PaperCut for Education solution to manage pupil and departmental printing. Education establishments are guaranteed to reduce printing output by at least 15% (industry standard) in adding this software solution to its managed print service.

Benefits of PaperCut MF for Education

There are a number of benefits to PaperCut for education establishments including:

• Easy to use – get started in minutes.
• Set quotas for student and staff printing, to re-coup the costs of printers.
• Allocate staff and students to faculties and departments.
• Watermark printing with student names and dates for easy identification.
• Change user behaviour with alerts and pop-up reminders.
Support mobile printing from any device.
• Follow-me-printing, allows users to send to one print queue and receive from any printer in the school by using a swipe card, biometrics (fingerprint technology) or a pin code.
• Track all print, copy, scan and faxes.
• Secure release of documents by requiring that users must log into a device.
• Works with any fleet of MFDs, single or mixed brands.
• Fully supported by Midshire technicians.

We know schools experience a number of print related problems, Papercut MF aims to make printing as easy and helpful as possible.

Prevent large print jobs

You can set an upper document size to prevent unusually large print jobs, or set a filter to include a maximum number of copies. There is even an option to stop ‘double submitted’ jobs, when users accidentally press print more than once.

Monitor print spend

PaperCut uses a currency based system for print accounting. Each user or department can be allocated a balance, and each print job can have a different cost dependent on the complexity (duplex, colour, booklet, hole-punch etc.). This model leads to less waste, as the user naturally choses the most cost effective method of printing for their documents. The user or department can have an allocated balance for any time period, from weekly or monthly, to a term or full school year.

Approve print

In a traditional print environment, a common scenario is that a user will print their document, without considering the number of pages in the document. They then forget to collect the document, wasting a large amount of both paper and toner. It also presents a security risk if those documents were confidential. With PaperCut software, when a user presses print, the job is held on the PaperCut server, and is only released from the printer when the user logs into the device using their fingerprint or swipe card.

Members of staff can also be responsible for approving the print, reducing even more waste.

Reporting

Head teachers or department heads are able to log into the PaperCut portal and see exactly what activity has taken place on the school’s printers. This can help the school to review budgets for the following year, or implement more stringent printing policies to help reduce print spend even further.

Printer Management

There are a number of rules that can be put in place for schools that are using PaperCut. These include:

• Reminding users to print in duplex via a popup.
• Route larger jobs to dedicated high-volume printers, rather than small, expensive desktop devices.
• Discourage users from printing emails.
• Default printing to just black and white, unless the user specifies colour.
• Automatically prevent large jobs from being printed.
• Restrict printing for particular users and on certain types of documents, ensuring huge documents aren’t accidentally printed.

Custom Rules

Rules are always backed up by customisable messages which explain to the user why their print job has been rejected by PaperCut, e.g. ‘this job has been denied, please don’t print jobs over 100 pages on the IT desktop printer, please send it to the reprographics department printer’.

PaperCut for Education Case Study

Midshire implemented a full Managed Print Service for St Cyres Comprehensive School in Penarth Wales, embedding PaperCut onto their Lexmark and Sharp devices, significantly helping their workflows and overall cost efficiency.