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Higher Education's Printing Problem

A quick quide to solving higher education's printing problem

Higher education has a printing problem.

It’s no one’s fault, not directly. Rather, it’s the result of progress. Let us explain…

Higher education, as much as any industry, has greatly benefited from the technological advancements of the past 20 years. From laptops to phones, broadband to cloud computing, everything it seems has been a boon for higher learning.

Each of these technology improvements has come at a cost though. Your print environment has struggled to keep up with change.

The rise of bring your own device policies thanks to the exceptional computing power of modern laptops, tablets, and mobile phones has caused major challenges for IT teams. How do you enable printing from these many and varied devices while maintaining adequate security?

Cloud computing advancements have introduced certain expectations for the student body. Why can’t I print something on my device and pick it up when I’m near a printer? Why can’t I press print at home and retrieve my documents securely when I’m next in class?

Perhaps you’re like many institutions around the world and have, over the years, found yourself managing a mixed fleet of printers. How do you give your users a unified printing experience?

Again, it’s no one’s fault. It’s just progress.

Fortunately, there’s a tested and trusted solution to these and many other printing problems. It’s PaperCut. And in the following pages, we hope to show you exactly why PaperCut will improve your printing experience for good.

The six forces affecting printing today

After 25 years of face-to-face interviews, site visits, questionnaires, polls, and thousands and thousands of software sales, we’ve been able to distil the six biggest challenges facing higher education today with respect to their print environment. In this guide, we’ll explore each of those challenges and explain how you can solve them with PaperCut.

It may be that you’re affected by one, two or all six of these challenges. It may be that something completely different is causing you stress. Either way, there’s a good chance another education facility has solved it using our software to improve their print environment.

The six challenges

1. Helping students and staff print from their devices, on or off your network

2. Creating a unified printing experience regardless of make or model

3. Ensuring your print environment is secure end-to-end

4. Reducing and recovering printing costs

5. Reduce your Helpdesk tickets

6. Rolling out new software is really hard and you don’t have the time

PaperCut Mobility Print, making BYO and mobile printing super easy

Getting students and staff printing from their own devices require roughly the following steps:

1. Install Mobility Print on an existing Print Server.

2. Choose a few options, like printer discovery mechanism.

3. Share a link to the built in Mobility Print setup page with students and staff. This page helps them get up and printing in a few steps without requiring any help from you, the admin.

When a user opens the setup link from their device, Mobility Print automatically displays the setup steps based on their device, whether it is a Windows, macOS, Linux, ChromeOS, iOS and Android device.

With Mobility Print, you don’t need to worry about the printer drivers needed on all these devices. As long as your server can print to the printer,

Mobility Print will take care of adding support for those devices. Mobility Print supports Cloud Print from Windows, macOS, and ChromeOS devices. When enabling Cloud Print, your students and staff don’t have to connect to any specific network to print.

Print Deploy, get the right print driver and right print queue to the right person in the right location, every single time.

Print Deploy is optimised for managed computers, and gives you more control on deploying manufacturer printer drivers with advanced finishing options and default settings based on where staff are and who they are.

A Print Deploy client can be deployed with your favourite MDM tool to Windows, macOS, Linux or ChromeOS devices. Once the client is installed, it will call back to the server to get a list of print queues and drivers to install.

As an admin, you can force install some printers, and make others optional. You can also configure zones based on network subnets, user groups/OU or hostnames. These zones will determine which printers to deploy to users.

Print Deploy enables you to optionally move away from legacy authentication, and instead use modern auth like Sign-in with Google or Sign-in with Microsoft. So even your managed computers no longer have to be joined to a local domain to get printing working.

With Print Deploy, your printers don’t have to be shared via a print server, you can deploy them directly from Print Deploy. However, in most Higher Ed environments I recommend separating students from printers using a print server.

At the end of this ebook, we’ll share a comparison between some of PaperCut’s public cloud and self-hosted products.

Creating a unified printing experience

That means whenever they approach a printer or multifunction device, they’ll have an almost identical experience on the printer’s display screen regardless of make or model.

We’ve spent (literally) decades perfecting the same experience on every compatible printer brand and platform possible. Because the last thing your users want or need is to arrive at a new printer and wonder how it works. Printing should be as effortless and nonbrainpower-using as possible. It’s a simple function that should always be simple. We bring the simple.

This also means PaperCut will work in any environment; we support all platforms equally. Our software makes it a breeze to print from Android, iOS, Windows, Mac and Chromebook devices. You also get the choice to host the server on a physical machine or a VM in the cloud, whether you are in camp Windows, Mac, Linux or Novel OES, we support all of these equally well.

With Find-Me printing (also called pull printing or follow printing) you also give your end-users the same universal experience at printers that are right next to them - essentially giving them the impression that printing is always available. Find-Me printing is the ability for your users to send their print jobs to a single print queue from their computer or device, and release their jobs from whichever printer they’re close to, whenever they want. Does Find-Me printing work seamlessly with Print Deploy and PaperCut Mobility Print? Yes, of course — your single queue is even available on your mobile or BYOD laptop.

This was just the first section of the "Solving Higher Education’s Printing Problem" Want to download the full Ebook?

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