Stop Printing...

The most crazy thing I've seen a school admin do to helped reduce paper was to print out the "most polluting users" report (trees consumed by each user) from PaperCut and post it on the staff notice board for all to see. He did this in his first week on the job at a new school! I suspect he did not make too many friends but I'm sure the teachers on the top of the list reviewed their printing habits! :)

Another story I herd was a situation where a teacher printed a class set to the wrong printer. They went to the printer to collect, could not find it, then re-printed another set. About 5 or 6 attempts they finally worked out they were selecting the wrong printer. The school tech collected the huge pile off the other printer and had the balls dump it on the staff room table with a note: "Going cheap! 200 unwanted copies of Ms. Smith's year 9 class notes".

Cheers,

Chris
Developer @ PaperCut

@Chris (Papercut)

Can your software force duplex draft etc? Do you know of any reliable way to make the print button generate a print preview rather than print directly. I have seen third party software as well as the Epson driver which does this but the 3rd party software was buggy in the extreme.

and peoples insistence on printing forms out to be filled in when sharepoint / infopath could keep it all digital

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Originally Posted by Alis_Klar

@Chris (Papercut)

Can your software force duplex draft etc? Do you know of any reliable way to make the print button generate a print preview rather than print directly. I have seen third party software as well as the Epson driver which does this but the 3rd party software was buggy in the extreme.

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Yes. PaperCut can enforce duplex. However IMHO it's not a good idea. A better approach is to default drivers to duplex and instead display a "guilt trip" popup if a user selects single-sided. e.g. "By printing duplex you'll save X trees!"

Here is an example. The text/design is customizable so you can turn it up or down as required.
http://www.papercut.com/images/scree...lert-sized.jpg

The reason for this is there are often legitimate reasons why a user would what to print simplex. The obvious one is transparencies, or the requirement to fax the job after. Or even the old fashion teacher that manually cuts-n-pastes :p . Asking users to confirm via an alert popup is a good compromise.

The same goes for:

• printing emails
• printing web pages in colour

Show a print policy alert popup instead.

Regarding the idea of a mandatory print preview. It's a great idea and I think something Microsoft should put in their print driver architecture as standard. Why make drivers all implement this with their own look-n-feel (and bugs!) Unfortunately MS have not many any significant changes to their print architecture in years! I've seen the Epson driver and it's a good start, but as you said the "extra fat" can lead to instability. Something Epson suffer from a little (just try their mac drivers :( )

Oh. Speaking of transparencies, this reminds me of a story my friend told me when he was working at ExxonMobile. His manager turned up to an important presentation with his transparencies printed in duplex! I hope he's not managing any Oil Rigs today :)

Cheers,

Chris
Developer @ PaperCut