Student printining aargh!!!!

[ITWombat]

What software and policies have people used here to facilitate student printing.
There is a major problem when particular PC clusters are located within particular departments. These departments are natrually reluctant to pickup the consumables tab for student printing related to the teaching in other departments.

There is then stalemate where some well endowed departments e.g. ICT, Art etc allow their students to print but other less fortunate subject areas have to do without.

One solution could be to centralise consumable management in the hands of the network manager. The problem is then how to stop some departments taking the mick just because they more access to computer rooms and know they don't have to pay. In time of tight budgets the temptation could be use student consumables to do departmental admin printing.

[Quackers]

If you use PCounter for the print auditing (£400 a server), you can give students credit/ have charge codes for different departments.......

We just have about £3000 a year for printing consumables (500 kids in the school). I just give out £0.50p a week to lower school, £1.00 a week to upper, staff can give more credit if need be for coursework. Seems to work for us.

[Jake]

Yeah, we are using PCounter too, though we are thinking of giving this a whirl.
http://www.softwareshelf.co.uk/files...cts.asp?ID=121

[broc]

We use Pcounter also. Our biggest problem was keeping a lid on colour laser printing (especially A3). Students get £5 quota per week, in effect unlimited monochrome printing but we charge 50p A4 colour and £1 A3. We also decided to bill curriculum departments for staff printing costs as they were some of the biggest user/abusers of colour printing. This was greeted with some howls of anguish from some departments but it has been in place for a year now. I reckon we will have saved at least £1000 after paying for Pcounter.

[russdev]

we use printer credits feature on rm network they get so many a month if they run out tough cookies (unless they had problesm printing or like in case of year 9 when they are doing mass project work) this keeps it down as they are conscious of it all time..

Also clearing any left over paper by printer by ripping it in half and putting it in bin each week does the job as well...

russ

[stejefferies]

PCounter seems to be the main player on here. we give the students more credit on request, but we activly check to see what they have printed. and obviously having to come to our office every 2 weeks is a big deterrant to most kids who would abuse it. they know the system is there, and they hardly ever abuse it.

[CyberNerd]

We have syslog send all the server logfiles to a mysql database.
We can search the database using phpsyslogng.
I wrote a python script that searches the logfiles for print jobs and displays a report of the top 25 users. The script emails the details to the boss who stamps on anyone abusing the system.

print quotas don't work here as we constantly need to update the quotas.

[Ric_]

We use PrintManagerPlus. In September all the kids were given £2 of print credit and I charge for actual toner/ink costs (approx. 1p for laser and 10p for colour inkjet). When this runs out, the kid has buy more credit.

I buy all toner/ink and the annual printing costs are pretty low.

Staff have unlimited printing but I regularly check up on what they have been printing to see who is taking the mic - I'd like to start charging departments.

If you haven't had this system in place you will find it a nightmare to implement - although if you tell your SMT that my annual consumable costs are approx. £2k for a school of 1100 they might stand up and take notice.