Making people think about printing.

[DJ-1701]

The Head and School Business Manager at the Primary School here are looking to make staff think about if they need to print in colour to the photocopiers due to the cost.

 

Unfortunately our Ricoh photocopiers don't prompt for an access code when printing and we have no software that asks them if they really sure they want to print in colour instead of just black. Have any of you got a solution in place that you would recommend that could do this, or curb their printing habits?

 

Cheers.

[JordanT91]

Use Papercut, give them a set amount of credit each week and charge a lot more for colour than for black. They'll soon start printing in black and white.

[hallb15]

Papercut - its not cheap but you have to weigh that against the potential savings of reduced colour printing.

[NB9457]

Or if you have something like Impero, Senso or NetSupport, these have built in print management options

[bald_pig]

Departments pay for printing out of their own budget here.

[DalekSec]

Another one for Papercut, used it at two places, high recommend!

 

(The software, not getting a papercut, they hurt... a lot. Even for Daleks)

[steveg]

We have ricoh copiers here, and printing was getting more and more expensive, they were printing way too much, especially in colour. I added codes to each of the copiers that only allowed printing in black and white, and we had a complete ban on printing in colour for a whole term, unless they sent it to me with an explanation of why it was needed in colour. I think I printed about 100 pages in total over a term, vs around 15000 normally! We have now created more codes on the copiers, 1 per year group (Primary School) that do allow them to print in colour. I then check how much they have printed at the end of a term. Any year group which has printed excessive amounts in colour will then have the colour option restricted for the following term.

 

So far, I have seen around a 90% drop in colour printing. I never expected it to be as effective as it has!

 

I did look at using impero for it, but it obviously wouldn't record photcopying, and any software that does include copying was too expensive once all the modules had been purchased.

 

Steve

[witch]

I set up the copiers so that you couldnt print in colour without a code - so at least people had to think about it. It worked well. Until the HT disabled all the codes

[Danp]

I'm going to say Papercut too, we have just completed our first year of it and are reviewing the data before implementing a new plan for September. Students have a set number of credits added on a Monday am and staff have an unlimited amount although larger jobs should go to our reprographics department rather than office machines.

[jthompson]

We have a Ricoh MFD in one of our departments where we've deployed the printer to PCs with mono set as the default option (colour is an option that users can switch to per job). It doesn't prevent or actively control whether or not someone can print a particular thing in colour, but it's drastically cut down on the number of jobs being classed as 'colour' (e.g. a mainly black print document that has a colour logo in the header, or a single word in blue, etc.) and therefore the overall costs.

 

We did that using Ricoh's 'Printer Driver Packager NX' utility.

 

This simply makes colour an opt-in, which may or may not go far enough for you.

[DJ-1701]

We have a Ricoh MFD in one of our departments where we've deployed the printer to PCs with mono set as the default option (colour is an option that users can switch to per job). It doesn't prevent or actively control whether or not someone can print a particular thing in colour, but it's drastically cut down on the number of jobs being classed as 'colour' (e.g. a mainly black print document that has a colour logo in the header, or a single word in blue, etc.) and therefore the overall costs.

 

We did that using Ricoh's 'Printer Driver Packager NX' utility.

 

This simply makes colour an opt-in, which may or may not go far enough for you.

 

I did take a breif look at the Printer Driver Packager NX... unfortunately it requires Dot Net Framework 2... and guess who has Windows 10 and Windows 2012 R2. :/

 

Still, I assume that once the user sets the printer to colour, it would keep that option as default?

[unixman_again]

Papercut is only part of the answer. You need a strong SLT too. We have Papercut here and staff have £10 (1000 sheets) per term. When they run out, we've been instructed just to give them another £10 'cus SLT can't be bothered to deal with it. Ideally the users should be made to plead their case as to why they've exceeded 1000 sheets and explain why bulk printing wasn't done through the resources department.

 

The only way to really reduce printing is to remove printers. I reckon we only need two, one at the north end of the campus and the other at the south end. If you work in the southern buildings, your printer will be the one at the north end, and vv. I guarantee that this would reduce printing. Another option (less draconian) would be to enforce "follow me", but they didn't want to do that. They reckon somebody will see confidential prints, even if the user has to physically attend the printer to print the documents. Go figure!

[jthompson]

I did take a breif look at the Printer Driver Packager NX... unfortunately it requires Dot Net Framework 2... and guess who has Windows 10 and Windows 2012 R2. :/

 

Still, I assume that once the user sets the printer to colour, it would keep that option as default?

 

Ummmm, not certain. If they modified the printer defaults via the control panel it would (our students can't do this), but if they just change the option via printer settings when sending something off to print (e.g. from the Word print dialogue) the default for the next print job is still mono.

[CHM-ITServices]

Papercut is only part of the answer. You need a strong SLT too. We have Papercut here and staff have £10 (1000 sheets) per term. When they run out, we've been instructed just to give them another £10 'cus SLT can't be bothered to deal with it. Ideally the users should be made to plead their case as to why they've exceeded 1000 sheets and explain why bulk printing wasn't done through the resources department.

 

The only way to really reduce printing is to remove printers. I reckon we only need two, one at the north end of the campus and the other at the south end. If you work in the southern buildings, your printer will be the one at the north end, and vv. I guarantee that this would reduce printing. Another option (less draconian) would be to enforce "follow me", but they didn't want to do that. They reckon somebody will see confidential prints, even if the user has to physically attend the printer to print the documents. Go figure!

@unixman_again do we work in the same school?

[Sydders01]

We have papercut and also we have Ricoh and HP laser p3015 printer. students are made to print to the Hp laser printer (which print just black) and we charge department on their printing

[just_david]

papercut and strong SLT.

Make departments pay for their own printing

 

Best part I found with papercut is making your own scripts pointing out how much it costs to the users and offering to reprint with cheaper settings.

 

That might be expensive though, so access codes for colour, all defaults set to BW.

A neat trick I saw was having the same printer listed twice, once for colour once for BW.

Just hide the colour from everyone.

[APMerry]

We're using equitrac which has a lot of controls, all printing set to BW and double sided as default. There's a lot of rules you can set, but the most important thing is an SLT that will back you up when staff start to complain they cant print whatever they want.

[Passat1983ICTech]

give the staff black and Coulor and give the students black only and give the studetn 50 p a week and give staff 50.00 pund every 2 weeks and set printer anything over 10 single printer they have to go to repor to get this printed

[GuyJD]

I set our printers to print in Black and white by default and now if find discarded b&w prints by the printers where they obviously wanted it in colour in the first place, I think we're saving money in the long run though even with the misprints.

[dry]

I did take a breif look at the Printer Driver Packager NX... unfortunately it requires Dot Net Framework 2... and guess who has Windows 10 and Windows 2012 R2. :/

 

Still, I assume that once the user sets the printer to colour, it would keep that option as default?

 

Get Print Driver Packager NX installed on a PC and configure the driver. Even if it takes creating a Win7 standalone non-networked VM, it's worth doing to create a custom driver. Looking at this page lists support for Win10/Server 2016 (not that I'd put it on a server personally! Customise the driver, export it, copy it to your print server and install the driver that way).

 

We've configured our Ricohs to default to double-sided B+W, prompt for a user code (for year group charging) and passcode (for releasing the job on the copier).

 

If worst comes to worst, create 2 separate print queues- Mono and Colour (using Printing Defaults), and set the Mono queue to be user's default printer via GPO.

 

A combination of the above has meant that it's simplest for staff to print using Mono double-sided (the most cost effective option) and they need to go out of their way to print in colour/non double-sided.

 

Staff still print rainforests worth of resources daily, but at least it's costing us significantly less!

[nathan3388]

we use ricoh photocopier photocopier at most of the schools we support. i have set codes up and also hold the print job on the photocopier side so then the member of staff have to go and and stand at the photocopier to print it so that there is no waste of paper or toner or time sorting through it. also i have turn windows logon name to be used to store the filename so that they know what is printing, but you can lock down what user can do what via the photocopier.

[DJ-1701]

Thanks everyone!

 

Get Print Driver Packager NX installed on a PC and configure the driver. Even if it takes creating a Win7 standalone non-networked VM, it's worth doing to create a custom driver. Looking at this page lists support for Win10/Server 2016 (not that I'd put it on a server personally! Customise the driver, export it, copy it to your print server and install the driver that way).

 

We've configured our Ricohs to default to double-sided B+W, prompt for a user code (for year group charging) and passcode (for releasing the job on the copier).

 

If worst comes to worst, create 2 separate print queues- Mono and Colour (using Printing Defaults), and set the Mono queue to be user's default printer via GPO.

 

A combination of the above has meant that it's simplest for staff to print using Mono double-sided (the most cost effective option) and they need to go out of their way to print in colour/non double-sided.

 

Staff still print rainforests worth of resources daily, but at least it's costing us significantly less!

 

Thanks @dry, I actually made a virtual Windows 7 and installed the program as you suggested. They are getting prompted for a code now, so at least that makes them think... on a couple of tests it wasn't validating the code against the copier codes (not sure why), but if you press cancel at that point it doesn't print anyway.

[elsiegee40]

We double-installed our printers with one version colour and the other mono.

 

We then made the default printer the mono version. If they want colour they have to change it.

 

I actually did this with our colour laser at home too.

 

People can't be bothered to go to printer settings and change it. Choosing a mono printer or a colour one with the mono as default they will do

 

It really helped with the battle to keep costs down

Edited May 26, 2017 by elsiegee40

[Big_Ted]

A solution like papercut is a great start. The next step is education, you can use a multitude of options in papercut to make people think about printing and make it cheaper but you need to start at the root cause - Humans!

Educate / scare the user base into understanding how much that bit of paper costs and what impact it has on your organisation.

[dry]

Papercut Print Logger is free and can provide fairly useful print data for analysis (in CSV format) without needing to commit to full fat Papercut. I've used it for a while now and SLT like the pretty graphs I make every few months