If you’re an IT professional, you know the problems associated with enterprise-level printing all too well. In fact, printing problems can rival desktop troubles in many companies, especially with the explosive growth in remote access printing over the last decade or so.
Following are a couple of simple, yet underutilized, ways for managing print capabilities in this type of environment.
I. Educate Employees: While printing is a seemingly simple task, the technology behind it has gotten more robust over the years. The functions that printers can perform nowadays run the gamut – from color choices to paper stock choices, to layout and design styles and more.
Users can be overwhelmed – and wind up not only wasting hard resources (e.g. paper), but soft ones, expensive ones as well (e.g. IT time) – if they don’t get what they want when they hit the “Print” button.
Hence, it pays to educate users about how to use printing devices. They are the frontline of defense against better enterprise print management software resources simply because they are the end user.
Educating users doesn’t have to be expensive. It can be done very cost effectively. For example, via your company’s intranet, you can easily upload how-to videos that demonstrate the ins and outs of how to use print software. And, you can even use popular video-sharing sites like YouTube to instruct employees.
II. Use Monitoring Software: In the past, when a printer went down, someone had to notify the tech department to fix it before it could be used again. Nowadays, this can be done automatically via monitoring software.
This software can keep IT up to date on a range of printer problems, not just mechanical malfunctions. For example, it can tell you if a certain machine needs more paper or if toner is low. In short, monitoring software acts offensively to prevent printing problems, as well defensively by alerting you to printer problems.
The reason these tips for managing enterprise-level printing are so effective is that every organization, no matter the size, can implement them immediately, and start garnering the benefits instantaneously as well.
Following are a couple of simple, yet underutilized, ways for managing print capabilities in this type of environment.
I. Educate Employees: While printing is a seemingly simple task, the technology behind it has gotten more robust over the years. The functions that printers can perform nowadays run the gamut – from color choices to paper stock choices, to layout and design styles and more.
Users can be overwhelmed – and wind up not only wasting hard resources (e.g. paper), but soft ones, expensive ones as well (e.g. IT time) – if they don’t get what they want when they hit the “Print” button.
Hence, it pays to educate users about how to use printing devices. They are the frontline of defense against better enterprise print management software resources simply because they are the end user.
Educating users doesn’t have to be expensive. It can be done very cost effectively. For example, via your company’s intranet, you can easily upload how-to videos that demonstrate the ins and outs of how to use print software. And, you can even use popular video-sharing sites like YouTube to instruct employees.
II. Use Monitoring Software: In the past, when a printer went down, someone had to notify the tech department to fix it before it could be used again. Nowadays, this can be done automatically via monitoring software.
This software can keep IT up to date on a range of printer problems, not just mechanical malfunctions. For example, it can tell you if a certain machine needs more paper or if toner is low. In short, monitoring software acts offensively to prevent printing problems, as well defensively by alerting you to printer problems.
The reason these tips for managing enterprise-level printing are so effective is that every organization, no matter the size, can implement them immediately, and start garnering the benefits instantaneously as well.