Case study

Trillium Lakelands District

Trillium Lakelands District School Board selects directprint.io’s cloud print management solution to enable printing for 17,500 students and 3,000 staff, across 60 schools.

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Trillium Lakelands District

Customer profile

Trillium Lakelands District School Board (TLDSB) was formed in 1998 with the amalgamation of the Victoria County Board of Education, the Muskoka Board of Education, and the Haliburton County Board of Education. Today, the Board covers an 11,500 square-kilometer area in the heart of Ontario’s cottage country. TLDSB supports approximately 17,500 students across elementary and secondary schools, as well as alternate education and training centers.

Challenge

When Google announced the deprecation of Google Cloud Print, Trillium Lakelands District began the search for a new solution that would enable students to continue to print from their Chromebooks.

“The Board covers a huge geographical area, corner to corner, it’s a six-hour drive. There are just two people in our 20-strong IT team responsible for Google Workspace and endpoint devices, and so having to manage onsite servers at 60 locations was not an option. We needed a serverless printing platform that we could set up and manage from a central point,” explained Tad Hawkins, Technical Services – Manager of Enterprise and Learning Solutions at TLDSB.

Solution

directprint.io partner Amplified IT, now part of the CDW brand recommended the directprint.io cloud print management platform and set-up a demonstration session to showcase how easy it is to deploy, secure, control and track print in the cloud.

Result

directprint.io was deployed across all 60 locations, providing students and staff with seamless access to printing.

“directprint.io is just easy. Set up was really quick and the integration with Google Workspace and single sign-on is a huge plus. We managed the roll-out centrally, directprint.io automatically discovered the printers, we did a bit of tweaking, and it was up and running in a noticeably short time,’ Tad explained.

Easy predictable pricing

directprint.io automates time-intensive manual tasks for IT teams and provides a seamless end-user experience.

“We don’t have to spend a lot of time managing the print infrastructure, we had an intermittent issue with one printer brand initially, but that was quickly resolved. We only go in if we need to add a new printer and that takes all of a few minutes. Our students continue to print as they always have – in fact, nobody noticed we’d actually implemented a new solution,” Tad said.

Real-time reporting

directprint.io delivers real-time data from a cloud-based dashboard, providing full visibility over printing activity at each school.

Tad said that having a complete picture over what students are printing is really valuable. “There are supply chain challenges at the moment with paper, so making supplies stretch further is key. Each school manages its own budget, and the print logs and user charts provide insight over how resources are being used. We can identify high volume users for example and share that information with school principals so they can act on it,”

Retain control

Policy management capabilities which enable default settings to be configured and print policies to be applied for different OUs, groups and users, is a useful feature. Trillium Lakelands District uses this to implement maximum page allowances, to enforce or suggest duplex printing, and to force black-and-white-only printing for example.

“We apply print policies at different schools, we work with the principals and apply them based on their requirements and preferences,” Tad concluded.

Find out more

If you’d like to find out more about how directprint.io can help your school, you can click here to arrange an overview with a member of our team.