To many businesses a printer constitutes an item of IT equipment that is more of a necessity than a luxury. To these people a printer is little more than a tool used to print out documents when required and little more. This, however, is not taking into account the full range of features available on a printer which can, amongst other attributes, help reduce costs, increase security and improve productivity. When used correctly a printer can prove to be an invaluable office resource.
Settings
One way to look at saving money around an office is to look at a printer’s settings. Whilst practically all printers these days have the capability to print in colour, this option can prove a wasteful and profligate extravagance when used as a default setting. Whereas printing in colour is useful, as well as desirable, in the production of sales and marketing literature, illustrated reports and similar literature, it also costs more to produce than printing in black and white. Thus great care should be taken when deciding whether to print in colour or plump for the cheaper monochrome option. An email, consisting almost entirely of text, is something that should never be printed out in colour and, as such, it is worth looking at which members of a department will ever need to access colour printing. Whereas a company’s graphics department will invariably need access to a colour printing facility other departmental areas should be set, perhaps by default, to monochrome printing. There are also even more sophisticated measures of cost control; some programmes can review a document that is being sent to print and, having analysed the article, can either pick the most appropriate style of printing or even decline the printing request. Similarly there are programmes which can track which department are printing what and, as such, allows for tighter budget allocation.
Security
Security control measures on a printer can also reduce environmental deficit, cut cost and, perhaps most obviously, help increase a company’s security protocols. One of the biggest potential security hazards in an office comes from not collecting printed confidential documents; security control suites are designed to make sure that any sensitive information like this does not fall into the wrong hands. Tracking options, as mentioned above, can improve accountability for staff members; it is possible to trace who printed out the confidential documents but did not collect them. This, however, is not a great solution – security has already been breached and it is better to prevent such a thing from happening rather than working out who to allocate blame to after the event. A way to prevent this problem is to use an application suite that requires anyone wishing to printing off confidential documents to input a personal code, either into their computer or the actual printer, each time a request is made to print a document. The idea with this code is to ensure a greater diligence when printing so this means that staff are less likely to print out in surplus which helps cut the costs of waste paper both in terms of money and environmental impact.
Networking
A way of cutting wasted time and increasing productivity is, particularly in offices with more than one printer, through the implementation of a network traffic control suite. Traditionally whenever more than one request to print has been made each request is cued in a first come, first serve manner. This can result in long waits and stalling in productivity and results in slow network speeds. An appropriate application suite can sidestep this issue and ensure that the document is intelligently routed to a printer that is either not in use or with a shorter cue so as to improve the speed of the network. This option also allows for the detection of printers that are out of service; traditional suites would send a request to a broken printer which would then sit in a queue for an indefinite amount of time.
Author bio
This post was written by Kieron Casey. He is a BA (Hons) Journalism graduate who blogs regularly on IT Solutions & Services, small businesses and networking equipment. You can see him struggling to use Twitter here.