Dealing with printing pain points in schools
This year, the directprint.io education strategy team have traveled across the US, showcasing how leveraging a serverless infrastructure to centrally manage print devices and printing, can eliminate common printing pain points in schools and districts.
We’ve exhibited at some of the country’s biggest education conventions, conferences, and exhibitions – including TCEA 2023 in San Antonio, TX; ISTELive 23 in Philadelphia;
BrainStorm in Pocono Manor, PA; and CITE 2023 in sunny Sacramento, CA.
We’ve spoken to a ton of educational professionals, school SysAdmins, and IT leads for entire districts, and there’s a consistent theme – print continues to be a burden on over- stretched IT resources.
Printing pain points – breaking it down
directprint.io is designed to revolutionize print management – whether your school uses Chromebooks, Mac, or Windows devices – or even all three. In this blog, we’ll run through the top five printing pain points and explain how we make it easy to deploy, secure, control, and track print in the cloud.
Printer deployment
directprint.io is vendor-agnostic – we support over 5,000 printer models via Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 across Chrome, Windows and Mac operating systems. Our universal print driver enables zero-touch deployment at scale and includes configurable advanced finishing options such as staple, fold etc. across all makes and models, ensuring a seamless, consistent print experience, regardless of the printer brand or brands you choose.
Plus, directory sync capabilities with Google Workspace and Microsoft Azure AD ensures simple printer deployment. Users are allocated printers based on their login, so as soon as they turn their machine on, they automatically get the correct list of available printers.
Access management
Providing a mix of users and devices with secure access to printers is another major printing pain point. With directprint.io, admins can grant print privileges for OUs, groups and users, determine which groups or individual users can use which devices, including those available for remote printing; provide special print privileges to VIPs, or even remove print access all together.
And for even more convenience, you can allocate a directprint.io QuickCode enabling end-users to self-serve, by simply entering it into the client application.
Managing and monitoring the printer fleet
Advanced reporting and analytics around print usage and behaviors, are among the many benefits of the directprint.io cloud-native print management platform. directprint.io also includes device monitoring capabilities. This value-added feature, which is available as an optional extra, provides a comprehensive overview of fleet performance, device status, supply levels, and counters – data that empowers IT leads to proactively respond to common issues such as paper jams or low toner levels and in many cases, resolve them before an end-user experiences an issue.
Keeping documents and data secure
directprint.io is packed full of features designed to keep documents, data and end-users secure. Features like Secure Print allow IT admins to apply print policies to groups, individuals, and specific devices for added security and even identify unusual printer behaviour, while PIN protected printing release features put an end to unwanted data
exposure.
Customers can mix Edge Print and Local Network Printing to find a balance that works for them and we also support zero trust environments.
Keeping on top of costs
Our cost-effective subscription model requires zero upfront costs, is flexible and allows you to scale up or down as your needs change needs. IT admins also have visibility of all print activity on the network from a single pane of glass and can use those insights to identify where resources are being wasted and enforce policies, such as restricted printing rights for specific users, to put an end to it.
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If you’re looking for a way to reduce those printing pain points and simultaneously improve printer access for staff and students – why not sign up today for a free 30-day trial and discover the true value-add of smart and secure serverless printing first-hand?
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