[CALIBK12] Print Management Systems

[Jamie Pruden]

Hi all,

Sorry... new on the list. I only copied this to Sarah, but I suppose I
should have shared with everyone.

smiles,
Jamie

btw I'm not a librarian... I'm an IT professional that works at a school. I
got on this list due to a friend that forwarded a questions about Mac
stuff... but I love to help out with this type of stuff. ;)

----------
We use PrintManger Plus... and I'd suggest that you might want to rethink
how you do this type of management. The software is generally buggy (we get
crashes and backlogged printing every few days due to the software... turn
it off and the problem goes away) and you really have to think about how
you're going to handle the situation when a student legitimately runs out of
prints. We've found it to be a logistical nightmare.

We give students 400 black and white prints for the year (our research said
that the average student used about 290 prints per year)... they get a
discount for doing double-sided prints (25% discount per page). Last year,
we installed a color printer, but costs on that printer required that we
charge the equivalent of 12 pages per color print. The librarians get very
testy when they have 5 or 6 kids per day coming up to buy more printing.
Ugh.

A couple of alternatives:

1. Place the printer in a non-accessible site
Students would have to go to the desk to get their prints. A little tedious
for the front desk, but gives better coverage of who is doing what...

2. Turn on banner pages on the Windows server
This will print a page at the beginning of the print job that identifies who
is printing the junk. Adds an extra page to every print job, but if you bust
'em once, the problem goes away very quickly.

3. Mac OS X Server
Apple's server has unlimited client licenses and includes a print server
with built-in user management. Very stable, no big hassles, and you can
easily see who printed what...



On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 1:52 PM, Iantha Cooper <ilcooper1 at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
> I'm interested in the same kind of services. Please keep me informed.
>
> Iantha Cooper, Teacher Librarian
> Oakland High School
> Oakland, CA
>
>
>
> --- On Thu, 4/9/09, Barbara Duffy <BJDuffy at lbschools.net> wrote:
>
> > From: Barbara Duffy <BJDuffy at lbschools.net>
> > Subject: Re: [CALIBK12] Print Management Systems
> > To: "Sarah Bosler" <daydream.queen at gmail.com>, "CALIBk12" <
> calibk12 at listproc.sjsu.edu>
> > Date: Thursday, April 9, 2009, 1:14 PM
> > Please keep me posted on the results.
> >
> > Thnx
> > Barbara Duffy
> >
> > >>> Sarah Bosler <daydream.queen at gmail.com>
> > 4/9/2009 8:27 AM >>>
> >
> > I am finally getting down to selecting a print management
> > system in
> > order to cut down on our kids printing too much junk.
> > I'm looking for a
> > system that gives kids an allottment of pages throughout
> > the year and
> > then alerts them to how many they have left each time they
> > print.
> > Currently we don't charge for printing but I'm
> > going to next year after
> > they use up their allottment.
> >
> > So far I am looking at PCounter, Print Console 3.0, and
> > K-12 VendPrint.
> > Does anyone have experience with any of these systems or
> > others you find
> > are easy to use?
> >
> > Thanks for your help!
> > --
> > Sarah Bosler, Teacher Librarian
> > Montclair High School
> > Chaffey Joint Union High School District
> > http://mohigh.com
> >
> > "Well-behaved women rarely make history" - Laurel
> > Thatcher Ulrich
> >
>
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