Originally published on November 17, 2016
Education printing solutions and enterprise printing solutions are one and the same. They both require reliability, scalability, security, and ease of use for administrators and end users. They also need all the bells and whistles to integrate with the ever-changing tech industry. For example, mobile devices are used more than ever in today’s classrooms, implying that mobile print solutions are necessary to enable mobile users to print from anywhere in the school. Overall, print management solutions for education need to combat the following difficulties that administrators and students encounter in their print environment.
1. Intensive High-Volume Printing
In a classroom, almost every print job can be considered quite heavy. Teachers may have to print hundreds of pages for tests and worksheets correlative to the number of students in the class. Conversely, students may also print thick stacks of paper for study materials, notetaking, and research.
When attempting high-volume print jobs, not only is your printer under pressure to deliver the goods, but a school’s print server is more likely to buckle under this type of print environment. Not to mention, high-volume printing greatly reduces print speeds for end users across the board, specifically when students attempt to print large jobs simultaneously.
Solution: Adopt a Serverless Printing Infrastructure
PrinterLogic SaaS helps get rid of your print servers by offering a serverless printing infrastructure allowing you to centrally manage printer objects, profiles, drivers, and settings from a single pane of glass. Additionally, print jobs don’t queue in a spooler, eliminating heavy print traffic and long wait times.
Furthermore, admins have complete oversight of their devices’ status. Through print alerts and SNMP monitoring, IT admins gain immediate insight into everyday errors like empty paper trays or the operational state of every compatible printer in your fleet. All in all, SNMP monitoring assists IT professionals by catching potential issues before they arise.
2. Students Are Constantly Moving
Whether they are moving between classrooms or to a different building across campus, one thing is for sure: students are always on the go. This presents a printing challenge because students will always need access to a different printer with each classroom change.
Students and teachers need to be able to send print jobs to the nearest printer and not to their homeroom classrooms for pick up later on. Print management solutions for universities and other educational institutions must account for this type of highly mobile, location-shifted printing.
Solution: Self-Installation Portal
PrinterLogic’s Self-Installation Portal empowers end users to be responsible for their own print jobs. Using the portal, students and teachers can locate and install printers with a single click. Admin can also upload customizable floor plan maps for their school, helping students and teachers locate their nearest printer.
Perhaps one of the biggest returns of this feature is cost savings. A school’s IT admins can now be more productive in other areas and step away from irritating print-related issues. Oklahoma City Community College (OCCC) witnessed the benefits of self-service provisioning firsthand when they migrated to PrinterLogic SaaS. Not only did OCCC give users more control, but IT also experienced fewer help desk calls.
3. Lack of Versatility
Some schools take what they can get with the resources they are given. This might mean buying low-cost computers and printers, regardless of brand, creating a mixed-OS print environment that can be a chore to manage. Many schools utilize a mixed-OS print environment and require a printing solution compatible with all of their devices.
This especially rings true for mobile devices and Chromebooks which are regularly used in schools because they are affordable and accessible. Chromebooks are as versatile as they come with the ability to run Android, Linux, the web, and Windows programs. But they aren’t necessarily heralded for their printing prowess.
During the COVID pandemic, Chromebooks surged from a tech novelty to an indispensable classroom tool; however, since Google Print Cloud’s discontinuation at the end of 2020, schools have had to search for an alternative way to print in their Chromebook-centric classrooms.
Solution: PrinterLogic’s Chrome OS Client Extension
At the end of 2021, it was estimated that over 40 million students and teachers used Chromebooks in the classroom, signifying the need to print with these devices is critical moving forward. PrinterLogic’s Chromebook Printing Solution provides schools with a way to harness Chromebook’s true printing capabilities.
Free of charge with PrinterLogic SaaS’s Core Bundle, Chromebooks can now be a part of your mixed OS printing environment. Along with eliminating the need for print servers, PrinterLogic’s Chrome OS Client Extension doesn’t rely on the internet to execute print jobs and keeps print jobs local and secure.
The extension is easy to deploy since PrinterLogic employs the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) which takes printer settings and automatically configures them for Chromebook users throughout the school. This allows students and teachers to choose their desired options and send the print job directly to the nearest printer.
Even if your school doesn’t use Chromebooks as a primary educational device, PrinterLogic’s enterprise-grade Mobile Printing feature enables students and teachers to print natively on tablets or other mobile devices.
4. Excessive Waste and Redundancy
Printing usually goes by the wayside when pertaining to school budgets. Yet, unnecessary print jobs can prove costly in the long run without proper management. A lot of waste stacks up from eager fingers clicking “Print” when a printer doesn’t immediately spring into action or when a teacher accidentally prints a 300-page book instead of printing a selection of pages.
Without a way to manage each print job, it’s hard to pinpoint which classrooms are going through paper and toner at an abnormal rate.
Solution: PrinterLogic’s Quota Management feature
Why constantly think about budgeting and print management when there is a feature specifically designed to do all the work for you? By implementing PrinterLogic’s Quota Management feature into your print environment, your IT admin can oversee print jobs based on two key criteria: price and volume.
Once you determine the criteria for print jobs across your school, you can break it down further by limiting the number of print jobs per individual or group. This alone already enhances the economy of your print environment. However, PrinterLogic takes it one step further with a time-delayed printing feature designed to counter printing the same print job over and over due to end-user impatience.
Admin can set the time limit between attempted print jobs in the Admin Console and limit users and groups to a predetermined number of pages for each individual print job. Need to raise (or lower) the allotted page count and print spending? Fret not. Trusted users can adjust quotas midstream to fit their current financial situation.
Reign In Your Education Print Environment
Thanks to its versatility, stability, ease of management, and convenient security features, PrinterLogic is the one print management solution that lives up to these unique demands placed on education print environments. Delivering all the cost benefits and efficiencies you would expect from enterprise printing solutions makes PrinterLogic one of the best print management solutions for schools, universities, and organizations.