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Print Management Automates 'Greening' of IT at Saint Mary's

2/14/2008

By Dian Schaffhauser


Each student is allotted $100 per year in printing--an amount that Hausmann derived by doing research among other campuses using print accounting methods and finally matching the quota offered at the large school next door, University of Notre Dame. Since the two campuses share students, it made sense, she said, to have parity. That buys 1,000 sheets--whether printed one side or both.

When the student chooses to print a file, another window pops up providing information about what's being printed, what printer is being used and what the charge is for the print job. To activate the print job, the student needs to enter a user name and password again. The second authentication forces the user to confirm the information and ensures that if she forgets to log out from a computer in a public area, nobody else can print from that quota.



A side effect, said Hausmann, is that students doing work for school groups, which have to pay for their printing by buying print cards, can print from that organization's quota without tapping their personal quotas.

Each year, the remaining quota for each student rolls over. If a student reaches his or her limit, the student can increase it by buying a print card from the bookstore for a specific dollar amount. The PrintLimit administrator creates the cards through a wizard that generates a list of personal identification numbers, then does a mail merge to load the PINs onto the cards, which can be custom-designed. The PIN list is uploaded to the PrintLimit server. The student who buys the card enters the PIN into the PrintLimit Web site. The next time she logs in, the new quota will be reflected in the pop-up window.

"We don't touch the money," said Hausmann. "We just generate the print cards [and] hand them to the bookstore, and the bookstore sells them."

When a printer needs to be taken offline, the software displays a message that can be customized to inform the user that she needs to print to another device.

Moving to a Printer Accounting Method
When Hausmann first approached her team--35 student workers--about the prospect of managing printer use, they were all for it. "They saw how much paper was being wasted every day," she said. "They are the ones refilling the printers with paper, with toner, having to remove the unclaimed print jobs from printers and putting it in a stack for scrap paper or into the recycle bin." Their support, she said, really helped communicate the importance of the change to the rest of the student body.

Then a reporter picked it up as a topic for The Observer, the student paper, after witnessing the waste that went on in the Trumper cluster. Hausmann supplied statistics her student workers had compiled on printer usage. In the article students balked at the idea that IT would consider a quota system for printer usage. "I am against being charged for using the printer because many classes require us to print off lengthy articles from Blackboard and the Internet," said one student in the article.


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