Printing guidelines \ responsibilties literature

[caffrey]

Not sure if this is the right forum, but I've been tasked to educate the masses about printing responsibilities as costs are going through the roof

 

Has anyone got anything they can share ? E.g posters etc.

 

In before good luck with that

 

Thanks in advance

[unixman_again]

I'd say - good luck with that. The only way to reduce printing is to remove printers, use pull printing and make people walk to collect their jobs. Ideally, you want one printer, in a basement room, behind a locked door, with a sign which says "Beware of the leopard".

 

We've tried signs saying "Only print what you really need" without success. We also have a printer credit system. Ideally, once you've used your allowance, you go to SMT and plead your case as to why you want more. SMT have washed their hands of it and told us just to allocate more on demand.

[caffrey]

Got to try though, costs are getting higher but it really is searching for the mysterious city of gold

 

Up to now I've removed all services from the MFD, implemented Papercut in anger (previously it was just a monitoring solution) using mobility print for mobile devices. I'm going to suggest removing photocopying from them

 

Just need a set of bullet points (not my words) to highlight areas where everyone can do their bit, supposed to be going to SLT with it as they want my suggestions - personally I'd just like to pull them all out and have a proper repro room

[mb2k01]

Got to try though, costs are getting higher but it really is searching for the mysterious city of gold

 

Up to now I've removed all services from the MFD, implemented Papercut in anger (previously it was just a monitoring solution) using mobility print for mobile devices. I'm going to suggest removing photocopying from them

 

Just need a set of bullet points (not my words) to highlight areas where everyone can do their bit, supposed to be going to SLT with it as they want my suggestions - personally I'd just like to pull them all out and have a proper repro room

 

How do you charge / recharge printing?

We used to have one central budget for all printing, which meant that largely no one cared.

Now we've got a halfway house were we centralise student printing, but staff printing is recharged back to department budgets - which has made them much more aware (after a few bumps and having to get HODs involved in talking to their staff)

[elsiegee40]

1. SLT needs to lead this, not you. Without their 100% backing for everything done you will get nowhere.

 

2. Print management software with enforceable limits that only get extended by exception (see 1)

 

3. Double install all printers. Make one version’s properties mono and double sided if duplex is available - make this the default printer. Make the other’s properties colour and double sided. So it can be selected easily... obviously pages printed this way cost more in the PM software.

 

4. Decide how pages are going to paid for. Is the limit “on the house” with the excess cross charged to departments? Or do you simply cross charge all printing to department budgets? (The latter is preferable)

 

5. Wear your strongest tin hat, stock up on eduhobnobs and switch it into action.

[caffrey]

We've never charged for printing here, its just been a personal thing for me to monitor - which came in handy recently when I got asked for reports

 

It really is down to educating people at the end of the day, people blindly pressing print without consequence without realising - it doesn't help that their book budget has been cut too...

[LeMarchand]

1. SLT needs to lead this, not you. Without their 100% backing for everything done you will get nowhere.

 

^^^

This. Without it you're just wasting you're time.

 

You could also try one of these above each printer, though most of the teachers I know would be likely to wonder when the PM was going to appear on C5's Big Brother.

 

[MatthewL]

You need backing from SLT, you need evidence and you need to be ruthless.

 

MFD's and no desktop, print management solution i.e. PaperCut, create departmental budgets and assign members to them, responsibility of departmental head to manage their staff who are abusing it (send them a report once a week), if more credit required either comes from other area in that departments budget or they have to beg the Head for more.

 

Create reports, set mono/duplex as default, train staff in better use to reduce printing.

 

Some users have valid reasons to print but you need to ask why and educate. Sometimes it might be a case they didn't know.

 

PaperCut will help you do all these, even in small steps by first just monitoring then Joe Bloggs can't get away with saying I only print once in a while which turns out to be 500 pages ever hour!

[caffrey]

It was SLT that instigated it, but I got fed up of waiting for responses to my emails so as usual I tend to go off on my own. I did wake them up a bit when I produced a user report for first 3 days of this week. If I can reduce the monthly cost by a 3rd I'll be happy.

Didn't realise you could create dept. budgets in Papercut, I thought it just used the AD OU structure - would mean I would need to make changes

[elsiegee40]

SLT took action when reports I produced showed that one third of the entire school’s printing was done by one user. A second third was done by one department.

 

The third third was everyone else, including students and office and admin staff!

 

The print bill decreased A LOT after that!

[Edu-IT]

It was SLT that instigated it, but I got fed up of waiting for responses to my emails so as usual I tend to go off on my own. I did wake them up a bit when I produced a user report for first 3 days of this week. If I can reduce the monthly cost by a 3rd I'll be happy.

Didn't realise you could create dept. budgets in Papercut, I thought it just used the AD OU structure - would mean I would need to make changes

Yes you can create accounts and place users from your AD within those accounts. Create your departments as accounts and put the relevant users as members. Doesn’t take too long.

[caffrey]

SLT took action when reports I produced showed that one third of the entire school’s printing was done by one user. A second third was done by one department.

 

The third third was everyone else, including students and office and admin staff!

 

The print bill decreased A LOT after that!

 

Yes, it's becoming apparent it's certain users - of course it's going to be these that claim that they neeeeeeeeed it

 

Oh and if anyone's using Mobility print, there's a issue with page level detection that's being worked on

Edited November 10, 2017 by caffrey

[Katy]

Yes, it's becoming apparent it's certain users - of course it's going to be these that claim that they neeeeeeeeed it

We discovered it was a certain department (can't remember which, was either science or maths) which was saving their budget by not buying text books (so they could spend it on other stuff) and instead printing huge stacks of paper for every pupil they taught. We're using Ringdale FollowMe at the moment but next year we will be switching to Papercut with new copiers, hoping to bring back departmental billing for printing in conjunction with reprographics doing the same - split the printing budget equally across all departments and add it to their individual departmental budgets, they then pay for their own printing or, if they print less, buy other stuff with it.

[nicholab]

My little saying is printing is not exciting unless you Gutenberg!! Printing should be avoided at all cost. You don’t chose your school on the one that prints the most. 22k spent on printing could buy something useful.

[caffrey]

22k ? and the rest.. and we are a small school too

 

Talked with SLT and came up with an action plan, basically force all print jobs to greyscale, implement mobile print, hard limits for kids through Papercut and all colour printing goes through admin

 

So far, no kickbacks

 

However it's not made a jot of difference, all it's done is shift the costs to admin... Mind you it's a busy time of year so I can only just monitor it and report back to SLT

 

Oh and the main school greyscale heavy duty photocopier broke on Monday (the day I implemented everything) and it's out of action for 3 days...

[mstech98]

What I do here is tell everyone their printer is on an ink budget. The team printers (where students and teachers print) are allotted 2 toners per school year. If they run out they have to plead their case to the principal. This seems to scare the adults at least into thinking about what they print.

 

The teachers were also told not to use the printer as a copier. Now, I can't really enforce that, but I can tell them when their ink is low and they don't have any replacements.

[SteveB_NI]

Using Papercut several years ago I decided to use a summer network upgrade as a good excuse to introduce printing restrictions at the same time.

 

I needed to cut the massive yearly expenditure on toner to ensure I was able to keep the network going - particularly as some replacements were due.

 

So from staff having free reign on the printers I implemented a 4 copy limit, no duplicates for 5 mins and for students even tighter restrictions on file names required etc.

 

It didn't initially go down well but soon slt realised the incredible savings on toner (photocopier usage obviously went up but that was a lot cheaper anyway) and they were happy.

 

Some staff for example admin have lessened restrictions for printing student reports etc.