If you use workgroup color MFPs, you were probably surprised to pay more than $ 200 for the yellow toner cartridge or $ 230 for the black toner. If you have a thousand of the beasts, that’s quickly a quarter to half a million in a quarter. The new multifunction network printers have good color and graphic results, but at a cost. Group printing has lowered the cost of support, but the new capabilities have come at a significant toner cost.
If you share a workgroup printer with other people, then you are aware of the loss of privacy for your documents. When you were printing at your desk, documents were confidential, now they can be seen by anyone who scans them at the printer.
If those problems sound familiar to you and they are your problems too, you may want to consider a printer output management solution. Such solutions generally contain two items, a central server software or a device, usually a PC / server with the software pre-installed, and a device next to the printer so the print queue knows that you are there, ready to pick up your Print. production.
Depending on the size of your operation, you can immediately see the benefit in saving toner and paper and can make a quick decision to employ such technology, or you may want to first find out how big your problem is and use an accounting cost and Print. survey software.
Using survey software generally does not tell the whole story and cannot account for issues such as productivity losses for reprints due to discarded printout by colleagues or reading of confidential documents by the non-party. wished. see the docs.
Once you have decided that you will or will have converged to workgroup printer and copier MFPs, and you want to manage color printing, faxing, emailing or copying for certain users, the best option it will be an exit management system that includes user authentication. .
There are many exit management offerings on the market, almost every printer manufacturer has their own system and if you only have one or two printers of the same brand and generally keep them for 3 years or more, that is the most cost-effective solution for those. printer manufacturers where the software comes free with the printer. Authentication systems supplied by the printer generally only work with PIN codes and are sometimes difficult to enter, depending on the capabilities, functionality and ergonomics of the front panel of the device.
If you have to pay more for software, you can consider a third-party vendor so that when you change your printer you don’t have to retrain your users on how to use another form of authentication. Only a standalone egress management solution will provide flexible, scalable, enterprise-wide egress delivery, monitoring and management through a unified infrastructure.
Some vendors offer very good ergonomic authentication readers, ranging from rugged keyboards, proximity cards, barcodes, swipe cards, and combo readers. The best systems will integrate with your access control systems and will be able to use your existing identification credentials to authenticate on the device or even combine the identification credential with the user’s fingerprint for more secure authentication.
The higher end of exit management systems will allow entry of cost codes, customer issue identification, user enrollment from the front panel, as well as getting feedback and job queue management from the printer’s built-in display or on An additional display unit supplied with the authentication system. This makes the output management solution usable in legal profession applications that require output production accounting and association with Customer Matter Codes.
Once you have many users who depend on the availability of workgroup printers, you may want to plan for redundancy, let the printing follow you to the printer where you are, and authenticate yourself. This Follow Me system allows you to pick up your print from any printer available in your organization and overcomes the odd setbacks if a printer runs out of toner or paper.
Some printers allow standalone vendor output management to run integrated into their printers and the best ones differ in that standalone software can run on the printer and standalone authentication readers can be connected directly to the printer, no need for external authentication devices. The most capable integrated solutions allow the user to control fax, email, and scanning, making it the most cost-effective way to implement an output device and print output management solution.
You want to find the database technology used by the independent software vendor and make sure it is transparent, such as MS-SQL or Oracle and their free versions MS SQL 2005 Express or Oracle Database 10g Express Edition. SQL or Oracle are truly the only practical databases for larger outbound management implementations, as they also allow sharing and integration with other business applications. MSDE has a 2GB size limitation and is only useful for small or well-maintained applications. A full SQL or Oracle license gives you all the tools and convenience, the downside is that it only runs on one server so you have to consider the higher cost of a server license.
High-end output management solutions can also inject barcodes and convert printer languages on the fly, as well as keep lower resolution copies of the printout in a separate format such as GIF or PDF so you can find them later by date. , time, user and content.
Costs vary widely from a few hundred dollars for a survey or accounting-only system to a few hundred thousand a year for a large enterprise-wide system, savings can be in similar ranges from a few hundred dollars per printer to one or two thousand dollars. dollars per printer per year at a large company or at a school or university.
If you are implementing exit management from scratch, you may want to select a vendor that can integrate PC access, area access control, and exit management into one system.
