Tooling up

• Article 2 of 2
• Document output management, May 2005
• View a PDF of the original article ~ 56K

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Managing printing seems almost like a contradiction in terms. For many IT directors, it is the ultimate devolution of power, with every PC able to print to any printer it can locate on a network or attached to one of its USB ports.

While print servers and server operating systems, such as Windows, do centralise print control to some extent, printing is licensed anarchy for most organisations. This shows up in the bottom line, with analysts Gartner suggesting that between 1% and 3% of revenue in any organisation is spent on printing. Printing is arguably one of the biggest unacknowledged, unaudited costs in most organisations.

However, print management software and hardware is becoming increasingly widely available. At the very simplest level, the free print management software provided with most printers can provide valuable insight into the daily running of printers, their various statuses and their use – far more than with the machines supplied just a few years ago.

Xerox’s CenterWare, for example, is bundled free with most of its mid-range and high-end workgroup printers. Its features include the ability to update firmware and install software on a whole fleet of printers, as well as monitor those printers and send messages to their users when, for instance, the printer is out of paper.

“The great thing about these tools is that they’re free,” says Angus Goble, document integration manager at Computacenter. “You don’t spend any money apart from the cost of deploying. But if I’m an IT administrator, I can gain an understanding of the infrastructure and I can monitor printers.”

Most organisations, however, only deploy these tools at a departmental level rather than at an organisational level, where the greatest benefits could be enjoyed. Such tools also aid outsourcing of printer management, which is becoming an increasingly important activity for organisations such as Xerox Global Services.

With the outsourcer able to see from a central console the state of printing across an organisation’s network, it is able to manage the printers at much lower cost. Typically, one of the first things an outsourcer such as Xerox will do is to refresh the client’s printer ‘fleet’. This is because not all printer models from the same vendor will work with these free tools: refresh rates of printers in most organisations are now reaching five to eight years, and many are simply too old to respond to new management tools.

However, those that do can also save administrators time. “If the printer’s not working and it’s the right age, I can see from the utility that tray two is slightly open and it needs to be shut, rather than have someone change the toner and waste three-quarters of a toner cartridge,” says Goble.

Almost all printer makers now sell their printers at a loss, making their profits up via the sale of consumables. With grey market, black market and compatible cartridges threatening to undercut these profits, manufacturers are adding increasing “intelligence” to their consumables to provide differentiation from these cheaper products.

This intelligence often comes in the form of greater manageability through the free administration tools, providing details of toner or ink levels, how much coverage each piece of paper is receiving and so on. Buying only ‘intelligent’ consumables may be the only way to benefit from some print management tools.

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