Strategies/tools for controlling spending in printing

We run a medium sized (400 users) healthcare organization (aka hospital). We are a Windows organization; our printers can be categorized in three groups:

• departamental printers hosted by a server in our matrix organization (I think it is a linux)

• departamental printers hosted in one of our servers

• local printers

For years, I have seen in our logs the reams of paper spent in non-work related jobs, but nobody wanted to "shake the boat". Now, the most important thing is spending cuts so something can be done.

I would like to ask for tips/strategies/tools to use to avoid the abuse. I see two main paths:

• restricting printing, so you can only print from approved paths. I do not like this approach because:

  • it causes administrative overhead, because it is different to know beforehand all the relevant (services are different, many times they get documentation from external sources, etc.)
  • when printing from IE, we need to restrict by the source URL.
  • as we need to be able to print local documents (Word / PDF), any control that we can set will be probably

• checking logs for abuse and reporting it. The issues with this method are:

  • administrative overhead, periodically logs will be revised.
  • the number of pages is not a reliable guide to abuse (the user that prints 100 pages a day may need to print these for his work, while the user that prints only prints 10 may be printing a chapter of a novel each day).
  • once you suspect something is not right, how do you check it? If you report that an user has printed "The Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.pdf", it is clear that it is an abuse. Also it is clear that the next time, the user will rename it as "Clinical History of patient 12.pdf", so our logs will probably need to be more extensive.

I somehow prefer the second approach (I do not care if an user prints occasionally a few pages, and I think that it is less disruptive).

In order to discuss tools, they must work on Windows. It would be better if they also work on linux, but it is not strictly needed (I could migrate the printers on linux back to my windows servers).

We went through a similar deal and ended up with "social justice" if that's even a catchphrase.

We had no desire to deal with extensive logging/reporting or the time it would take to arrest and convict someone of printer abuse.

So...we ended up doing the following:

• Put signs on all of the printers that stated "Think Green and control spending! Please use the printers and copiers for work purposes only. Print in black and white and double sided when you can. NOTE: all print jobs are logged and weekly reports are sent to management to maintain adherence to the printing policy."
• Set everyone's default printing to black and white even on the color copier/printers.

All of a sudden our printing costs dropped dramatically, especially for color printing which is the most expensive.

Even though we aren't actually doing any logging/reporting, the little white lie that we are is enough to make most people not abuse the printers.

If it's a tool you're looking for, I can recommend PyKota; I used it to implement printing quotas in a public school environment. It's GPL and has commercial support.

I think that you should be looking into a MPS solution probably the best for your environment as I have read would be Papercut (MF if you have MFP's or NG if you dont).

This package allows you to quota users, monitor trends in print, restrict certain documents to mono etc. It is a very very powerful utility which will without doubt reduce your spend on printing. - It is also free from requiring you to use 3rd party port monitors.

There are far too many benefits for me to simply list in one answer here, take a look at the companies website to find out how it can benefit you further. Of course if you have anything which you would like to ask me please feel free to send me a message.

One last thing to add feature wise is the ability to add javascripts to your print queues. This enables you to use popup prompts should someone print a large document in colour, then give opens to drop the job, force it to put on a high volume/more cost effective printer. I'm sure you would find what you require with this product.

Not to mention you are welcome to the free 40day fully working trial from their website.