Limiting Colour Printing To Students

[napsburypark]

Hi Everyone.

 

I put in a new £2500 Colour Printer in our Library over the summer which Students & Staff print to.

 

At the moment I have our librarian changing the restrict colour usage setting on the printer menu which is not ideal.

 

We can pause printing queues and release individual jobs however I would like to know if their are any solutions out their that will ask a student if they would like to print in colour or B&W so they can choose?

 

Thank you.

[ranj]

I'm not sure if you can get an option where it asks the students if they want to print in bw or colour but I would seriously recommend that you look at papercut to manage your printing costs.

 

Its brilliant and actually they released a new version of it today which includes support for additional lDAP directories.

 

You can set so many policies with it, you may be able to do what you want, I am not sure would have to check.

[clareq]

Install the printer drivers twice - set one to only print mono, the other to print colour.

[dgsmith]

In fact, papercut allows you to script a message when someone prints to a colour printer, and give them the option for example either to transfer the job to a mono one or print it in mono instead. Can't say I have used this feature yet but sounds like the ideal setup for you.

 

Personally, and this is from experience, but separate mono and colour printers is a disaster (this includes 1 printer with 2 drivers/queues). Kids still either print full page stuff to the colour and if they want something in colour but the mono is default, they'll resend to the colour therefore wasting paper and mono toner. It cost us more than just having 1 colour printer alone. My opinion is don't go down that route - you need some clever scripting.

[pete]

Most printers (at the £500 mark and above) can run multiple printer ports (9100 - 9110 or so) with per-port settings. Assuming yours can do that, I'd configure the default on 9100 to be mono and share that as the "Library Printer" and set colour on 9101 to be "Library Colour Printer". That way they have to consciously pick colour.

 

Colour printing costs more here and the print credit is mostly used as a brake on idiocy. Excessive colour printing (say not Art, Food Tech or other subject known for it) requires explanation before you get more credit.

[dgsmith]

That way they have to consciously pick colour.

 

That still doesn't work (at least for us) - I find kids just press print and sometimes if our printer mappings are out of sync a room the other side of the school gets loads of printoffs before the kids even notice it's the wrong printer!

 

Seriously, look at papercut scripting or some kind of scripting - any type of dual queue setup really isn't the way to go. We still have some rooms with this and I am forever finding tons of mono printouts abandoned. You either set mono to default and waste mono toner and paper, or set colour the default and see barely any mono usage. However, dual print queues I think *could* work if colour was default, and a script asked the user if they'd rather print to a faster/cheaper black only printer, but the default would always have to be colour; I think (but can't be sure) that papercut can automatically transfer a job to an appropriate mono printer nearby - i'll have to check this out for ourselves too!

[jsnetman]

We do the two printer driver method, install IIS web printing and advertise the colour printer driver via a web page on the intranet. We set permissons on the actual IIS printer page by creating a single user in AD and setting NTFS permissions to the actual page. So for example pupils in the art dept go to the art colour printer on the intranet page and try to connect, it issues a username and password prompt, teacher either supplies it or does it themselves, if they supply the password to the whole group they change the password via a script after the lesson. It has drastically reduced colour printing here. One flaw in this setup is that any departmental username and password will connect to any colour printer, the pupils or staff don't know this and I aint telling them. The mono driver is deployed via AD automatically. Edited October 20, 2010 by jsnetman

[Progeniga]

Just as another thought...

 

In our school this year the ICT department has stopped students printing anything. As coursework is becoming more electronically submitted it is easier for us to handle if we teach them how to use the PDF converter printer.

 

It's not a whole school implementation, just the ICT computers which have a profile only allowing access to the convertor. This has so far saved a fortune in terms of toner and paper in the first half term and may well be the way the whole school goes soon.

 

Teachers can still print relevant work for the students, but it is therefore controlled by somebody who is not going to print 200 copies of the same thing!