Originally published on November 17, 2016
When searching for an effective education printing solution, take a look at enterprise printing solutions. You’d be surprised at how easily they can fit your checklist of requirements. Education printing solutions and enterprise printing solutions require reliability, scalability, security, and ease of use for administrators and end users. They also need all the bells and whistles to integrate with the ever-changing tech industry. For example, mobile devices are used more than ever in today’s classrooms, implying that mobile print solutions are necessary to enable mobile users to print from anywhere in the school.
Overall, print management software for schools needs to combat all the difficulties that administrators and students encounter in their print environment. Here are some of the top printing challenges that educational institutions, specifically K-12 schools, face and how enterprise print management systems solve those problems for both teachers and students.
Printing Challenges that Educational Institutions Face
Challenge #1: Intensive High-Volume Printing
The average school uses roughly 360,000 sheets of office paper per year—and that’s not including textbooks. To handle such high-volume printing, schools need reliable printers, simple-to-use printing software, and print management training to organize print jobs. Teachers may have to print hundreds of pages for tests and worksheets correlative to the number of students in the class. Conversely, students may also print thick stacks of paper for study materials, note-taking, and research.
When attempting high-volume print jobs, not only is your printer under pressure to deliver the goods, but a school’s print server is more likely to fail in this type of print environment. Additionally, high-volume printing greatly reduces print speeds for end users across the board, specifically when students attempt to print large jobs simultaneously.
Solution: Adopt a Serverless Printing Infrastructure
Enterprise print management systems, such as Vasion’s PrinterLogic SaaS, help get rid of your print servers by offering a serverless printing infrastructure that allows you to centrally manage printer objects, profiles, drivers, and settings from a single pane of glass. Additionally, print jobs don’t queue in a spooler, eliminating heavy print traffic and long wait times.
Furthermore, admins have complete oversight of their devices’ status. Through print alerts and SNMP monitoring, IT admins gain immediate insight into everyday errors like empty paper trays or the operational state of every compatible printer in the fleet. All in all, SNMP monitoring assists IT professionals by catching potential issues before they arise.
Challenge #2: Students Are Constantly Moving
Whether they are moving between classrooms or to a different building across campus, one thing is for sure: students are always on the go. That movement presents a printing challenge because students will still need to access a printer with each classroom change.
The homeroom classroom or library isn’t always close enough. Students and teachers need to be able to send print jobs to a nearby printer no matter where they are. Print management solutions for universities and other educational institutions must account for this type of highly mobile, location-shifted printing.
Solution: Self-Installation Portals
PrinterLogic’s Self-Installation Portal empowers end users to be responsible for their own print jobs. Using the portal, students and teachers can locate and install printers with a single click. Admins can also upload customizable floor plan maps for their schools, helping students and teachers locate their nearest printers.
Perhaps one of the biggest returns of this feature is the cost savings. A school’s IT admins can now be more productive in other areas and step away from irritating print-related issues.
Oklahoma City Community College (OCCC) witnessed the benefits of self-service provisioning firsthand when they migrated to PrinterLogic SaaS. Not only did OCCC give users more control, but the IT department also experienced fewer helpdesk calls.
Challenge #3: Lack of Versatility
Some schools take what they can get with the resources they are given. This might mean buying low-cost computers and printers, regardless of brand, which creates a mixed-OS print environment that can be a chore to manage. Many schools utilize a mixed-OS print environment and require a printing solution compatible with all their devices.
This especially rings true for mobile devices and Chromebooks, which are regularly used in schools because they are affordable and accessible. Chromebooks are versatile, too, because they come with the ability to run Android, Linux, the web, and Windows programs. However, they aren’t heralded for their printing prowess.
During the COVID pandemic, Chromebooks surged from a tech novelty to an indispensable classroom tool; however, since Google Print Cloud’s discontinuation at the end of 2020, schools have had to search for an alternative way to print in their Chromebook-centric classrooms.
Solution: PrinterLogic’s Chrome OS Client Extension
At the end of 2021, it was estimated that over 40 million students and teachers used Chromebooks in the classroom, signifying that the need to print with these devices is critical moving forward. PrinterLogic’s Chromebook Printing Solution provides schools with a way to harness Chromebook’s true printing capabilities.
Free of charge with PrinterLogic SaaS’s Core Bundle, Chromebooks can now be a part of your mixed-OS printing environment. Along with eliminating the need for print servers, PrinterLogic’s Chrome OS Client Extension doesn’t rely on the internet to execute print jobs and keeps print jobs local and secure.
The extension is easy to deploy since PrinterLogic employs the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) that takes printer settings and automatically configures them for Chromebook users throughout the school. This process allows students and teachers to choose their desired options and send their print jobs directly to the nearest printer.
Even if your school doesn’t use Chromebooks as a primary educational device, PrinterLogic’s enterprise-grade Mobile Printing feature enables students and teachers to print natively from tablets or other mobile devices.
Challenge #4: Excessive Waste and Redundancy
As schools face continued budget cuts, there’s no room for waste. Paper waste stacks up from eager fingers clicking “Print” multiple times when a printer doesn’t immediately spring into action or when a teacher accidentally prints a 300-page book instead of printing a selection of pages.
Without a way to manage each print job, it’s hard to pinpoint which classrooms are going through paper and toner at a higher-than-normal rate.
Solution: PrinterLogic’s Quota Management Feature
Why constantly think about budgeting and print management when there is a feature specifically designed to do all the work for you? By implementing PrinterLogic’s Quota Management feature into your print environment, your IT admin can oversee print jobs based on two key criteria: price and volume.
Once you determine the criteria for print jobs across your school, you can break it down further by limiting the number of print jobs per individual or group. Doing this alone already enhances the economy of your print environment. However, PrinterLogic takes it one step further with a time-delayed printing feature designed to prevent printing the same print job multiple times due to end-user impatience.
Admins can set the time limit between attempted print jobs in the Admin Console. They can also limit users and groups to a predetermined number of pages for each individual print job. Need to raise (or lower) the allotted page count and print spending? Trusted users can adjust quotas midstream to fit their current financial situation.
Challenge #5: Limited Collaboration
Collaboration on physical documents may be limited. For example, teachers and staff may need to physically share lesson plans, permission slips, or other documents. They may also need to send them via email by manually attaching digital files, which becomes cumbersome as more documents need sharing. Additionally, staff and administrators across districts may be limited in their ability to access important documents from remote locations. This issue can make it difficult to collaborate with others, especially when class is remote or teachers are grading from home.
Solution: Enhance Document Shareability
Staff and teachers can quickly scan paper documents in a print management system and send the files to anyone in the school instead of manually attaching files to emails at their desks. Overall, this quick-scan feature saves time typically spent on tedious, manual tasking, and staff members can easily collaborate faster and more often. The best part of enhanced document shareability? Teachers can take advantage of this feature without compromising data security.
Challenge #6: Unorganized Document Management
Classrooms see lots of paper every day, ranging from student work and homework to permission slips, packets, and other learning materials. All these loose documents can be difficult to maintain and organize if educators or staff members don’t stay on top of it all the time. With high teacher turnover and frequent substitute teachers, classrooms need organized documents to make sure students are still staying on track with lesson plans.
The lack of storage space becomes an issue as well, which contributes to the chaos. With limited space and high disorganization, it’s hard for teachers to store and keep track of collected, signed parental permission forms and other documents.
Solution: Transition Away from Physical Documents
Scan paper documents into digital files on a print management system, reducing the need for constant printing, sharing, and storing hard copies while easing the load on physical storage cabinets. Doing this keeps your files organized, too, so teachers can always find lesson plans and assignments on servers without having to hunt for them.
Print management systems can also help teachers collect student and guardian permission forms and registration papers from any device. Print management solutions come with drag-and-drop eForm builders so teachers can quickly customize forms. PDF-to-web form converters make it easy to work with forms in different formats, and the forms are embeddable to any website.
Challenge #7: No Printing Oversight
Administration often can’t see who is printing what, when, and how often until the printer runs out of paper and ink or throws up errors. Without oversight, teachers and students are also free to print as much as they’d like. There aren’t any restrictions in place to help protect against excessive printing.
Without proper printing oversight, schools are also at risk of data breaches. Around 27% of IT security incidents are related to paper documents. To limit hacking and data breaches from unattended printed paper, oversight is vital.
Solution: Access Printing Insights
Not only does accessing printing insights help increase security and decrease the risk of data breaches, but oversight can also help improve efficiency. Get full visibility into all user scan activity within a print management system’s admin console to manage security and improve workflows to track cost-savings, project budgets, and even inform future purchases, like additional scanners for staff.
Printing oversight offers insights into efficiency, too, identifying which printers are used most, who is hitting their quotas fastest, what kinds of documents are printed most frequently, and how to find ways to reduce printed paper. In print management systems, those with oversight access can create quotas. Quotas can be assigned by modes, encouraging users to use color, collated, or other specialty printing scrupulously.
Challenge #8: Printer Overload
When too many users print from the same printer, print queues can get lengthy, ink and toner replacements proliferate, and technical issues are more common. These issues get costly—not to mention the general wear and tear on the printer itself (which can be expensive when it’s time to repair or replace the hardware).
Solution: Be Kind to Your Printer
Print management solutions pace print jobs and materials so the printers don’t get overwhelmed. This software can also monitor ink levels, paper levels, paper jams, and technical problems to help fix issues before they happen. Predictive maintenance is another feature that helps school districts save money before repairs become expensive.
Give Your Print Environment an A+
Despite the numerous challenges listed above, schools have options for tackling printing challenges. Enterprise print management systems, especially Vasion’s PrinterLogic solution, can help solve printing problems. Thanks to its versatility, stability, ease of management, and convenient security features, PrinterLogic is the one print management solution that lives up to these unique demands placed on educational print environments. Delivering all the cost benefits and efficiencies you would expect from enterprise printing solutions makes PrinterLogic one of the best print management solutions for K-12 schools.