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Campus Focus
Print Management Automates 'Greening' of IT at Saint Mary's
2/14/2008
Rarely do bad habits change just because somebody has brought your attention to them. Most of the time, change requires some form of vigilance, whether self-imposed or provided by others--or even better, by automation. In the case of Saint Mary's College, a women's college in Notre Dame, IN, the bad habit was paper waste.Yet by implementing a network-based printer accounting program for publicly accessible printers on campus, the college was able to decrease its paper costs alone for its four most used printers by about $1,269..
According to Kathy Hausmann, coordinator of student computing for the 1,600-student campus, over the course of the 2005-2006 school year, a single printer--a Xerox WorkCentre Pro 55--pumped out 548,260 pages. The 24-hour computer lounge in the basement of the library where that printer lives had a standing order for delivery of eight boxes of paper every week. But the people who provided support to users in that cluster noticed something: Students were oblivious to their print habits.
The biggest issue, said Hausmann, was that students would print PowerPoint presentations from their instructors without checking the print settings. "They'd see that it was printing one slide per page, default, [which] they're not going to want to put in their binders. So they'd leave it in the printer, go back to their seats and print the file again." They wouldn't even bother to remove the first print job and put it in the recycle bin, she said.
The primary goal of the new system was to make students aware of what they were printing.
The college's CIO at the time suggested a particular print management software product, which Hausmann's group tried for about four months in test mode. In spite of vendor support, they couldn't get it to work on their network. A timely postcard arrived advertising PrintLimit Pro from GenevaLogic. The team had a demo version up and running in less than a day. From there, they tried a two-week trial in the largest computer cluster on campus--Trumper--where the Xerox machine as well as an HP Laserjet 8100TN reside.
"It worked beautifully," said Hausmann. So the school bought a perpetual license covering up to 2,999 users for about $4,495 and a maintenance agreement for $899 a year and deployed it to the printers used by students.
How PrintLimit Works
When a user sits down in front of a machine in one of the computing centers at the school, she has to log in for LDAP authentication on the network. The PrintLimit client software, installed on each computer, pops up a window announcing the student's remaining print quota.
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