Tip #3: Trim your budget and put the brakes on unnecessary printing

We often hear from IT administrators how frustrating it is to rein in runaway printing costs. When students are allowed unrestricted printing privileges, waste is inevitable. Computer lab recycling bins are full of documents that are printed unnecessarily and then promptly discarded. Even simple measures such as double-sided printing can be difficult to implement.

Solution: Implement a print management solution to reduce waste and save money

With a print management system, printers can be monitored and IT managers will have a variety of tools to manage printing. It should be easy to implement duplex printing, set page limits on print jobs and detect and delete duplicate print jobs. The savings are implementation-dependent, but simply monitoring printing will typically yield a 10% to 20% savings over an unmanaged print environment.

What to look for in print management software

•Web-based administration: Your print management solution should enable you to manage printing from anywhere in your network. Whether you are at home, in a meeting or on the road, if you can access your network, you should be able to get an immediate update of printing activity, adjust print quotas or generate a report.

•Customizable reporting features: The ability to report on printing by user, job type, or department and printer usage er usage and user print habits is essential to effectively managing your printing. Your print management solution should have standard reports as well as customizable reports, and should be set up to automatically email any reports to key stakeholders.

•True multi-platform support: Your print management software of choice should have not just cross-platform support, but true multi-platform support. You should be able to support multiple server platforms on one network, as well as deploy the software on one platform, but host print queues on a mix of others.