(This is an updated blog post from 2022)
In 2025, schools face a unique challenge—balancing the need for digital transformation with the continued demand for printed materials. From lesson plans and student handouts to administrative documents and parent communications, printing remains a vital part of K-12 education.
Printing can be tedious, even for the most skilled IT teams and system admins. Believe it or not, Gartner says printing accounts for up to 50% of support calls! Think about it—paper jams, running out of ink or toner, and printers that mysteriously vanish from the network. It’s enough to keep anyone busy.
(By the way, our Printer Monitoring feature can help out with that – paper jams, consumable outages, and offline printers – we go into more detail in section 6!)
Now, if that’s tricky for businesses, imagine what K-12 school system admins deal with. These folks are juggling all the tech and printing needs for entire schools and districts, often with tens of thousands of students (some districts have over 80,000!) ranging from energetic kindergarteners to tech-savvy high schoolers.
Managing printing in schools can be a real headache, but directprint.io understands the strain. From tight budgets to tech hiccups, we know the struggles K-12 schools face every day.
That’s why we’ve put together the top 7 reasons why directprint.io is the best print management solution to simplify your school’s print infrastructure. Ready to make printing easier, smarter, and more cost-effective? Let’s get to it!
1. We know Google Workspace better than any other Print Management Solution
We’re Chrome Enterprise Recommended, that means our Print Solution has been validated and approved as a best-in-class printing solution by Google for support with Google Workspace organizations.
Why are we the best? Well..
- Google Workspace and Chromebook printing is why we exist! We built a Chrome application print driver to support ChromeOS printing and we were one of the first print management solutions to do so.
- We sync with your Google Workspace to understand your OU, group, and device structures, this allows for some pretty awesome printer deployment options whether you wish to deploy to OUs, groups, devices or fixed terminals.
- Additionally, we can support all advanced finishing options on Chromebooks for your copiers. So if you have a device fleet with flashy finishing options such as stapling, hole punch and then we have you covered.
- Finally, we haven’t forgotten your Windows and Mac users either. Our solution and print driver works with all major operating systems providing end-user simple printer allocation via Google Single Sign on. Oh, and did we mention that we’re a Google Technology Partner? Check us out at the top of the list for Google Cloud Print migration partners.
2. We can help you deploy, secure, control and track printing
Before implementing cost saving measures, it’s important to understand your overall print activity…… Once you have an understanding then you can bring control and print related cost reductions to your organization.
Keep on top of users who misuse their print capabilities by applying print policies to OUs, groups, users, or printers. Policies can limit the number of pages printed in 24 hours, force mono, force duplex etc.
Controlling print activity in a school setting is difficult; we regularly hear stories of children trying to print their favorite fiction.pdf books or similar resulting in high printing costs, jammed printers, and low toner levels.
Take a proactive approach to print activity by;
- Controlling who is allowed to print
- Setting the maximum number of pages users can print in a 24hr period
- Forcing or delegate options such as duplex and mono vs color and other advanced finishing options
- Enabling secure pin release
Need to be reactive as well? No problem, just use our custom reporting functions to;
- Identify printer misuse and resolve it by removing an individual’s print privileges.
- Set budget alarms and warnings
- Track down issues by using our error logs and remedy the issue with guidance from our suggested fixes.
3. Unmanaged Chromebooks, Windows or macOS devices, or transient users that need quick access to printers?
Users can assign printers to themselves through the use of our QuickCode feature. When building your printer map/network in directprint.io everything you add is assigned a 4 digit QuickCode. QuickCodes allow users to allocate printers to themselves by entering the QuickCode into the directprint.io client application.
For example, if your Superintendent is visiting schools across the district and they need quick access to printers, then they can quickly enter a 4 digit QuickCode and have access to an individual printer, a room’s worth of printers, properties worth of printers, etc.
Furthermore, our new Dynamic QuickCode feature allows administrators to have greater control over the distribution of and validity periods for QuickCodes.
4. We’re a SaaS-based Print Management Company
We’re a SaaS-based Print Management Company, but what does that mean?
We’ve got great support with a preference over face-to-face rather than ping pong support tickets. We’re a serverless print management company. You have no on-premise print servers to manage and no manufacturer printer drivers to install. Best of all, we’re cost-effective too.
- You have no print servers to install, manage and maintain. directprint.io is a serverless print management solution with a balanced mix of cloud administration and direct IP printing (we support cloud printing too).
- We don’t have ‘boots on the ground’ support engineers when things go wrong, but we do have a great support team or will join you on face to face video calls.
- If you need a setup session to get things going, a technical support call to work through an issue, or want to work it out for yourself, we’ve got you covered.
- Our preference is talking face to face over video calls, doing screen shares, and just getting things fixed without support ticket tennis.
5. We’re cost-effective and believe that we won’t be beaten on price
directprint.io is cost-effective. We understand that managing school budgets is a challenge and printing is one of those things that can easily get out of hand in terms of costs.
With a combination of removing costly on-premise print servers, implementing control methods to reduce printing, and use of reporting to track print activity, directprint.io can help you substantially reduce printing costs.
We offer this all for either a fixed annual fee or monthly subscriptions and believe we won’t be beaten on price.
We’re super flexible on payment methods, if you need to pay by check, that’s fine with us. Quote, purchase order, and invoice? That’s also fine with us. Perhaps, you just want to enter your credit card details and use our service on a monthly subscription basis, also fine with us.
6. Printer Monitoring helps users stay ahead of print-related issues
Our Printer Monitoring feature allows you to stay ahead of print-related problems with real-time monitoring designed specifically for cloud-based organizations. This requires no on-premise installation, making deployment effortless and maintenance minimal.
By providing valuable insights into printer performance and usage, IT teams can proactively address issues before users even notice them—reducing the support burden. Automatically track consumable levels, overall device health and replace supplies through analysis from the dashboard. Say goodbye to paper jam worries and consumable outages.
With detailed usage analytics, organizations can make data-driven decisions to optimize printing habits and cut down on consumable costs—all without the need for a local data collection agent.
7. directprint.io RED
Alongside the rich feature-set of directprint.io, directprint.io RED delivers vendor-agnostic print management, monitoring and access control in one powerful platform.
- Follow-me print queues – Increase document security when you have different print users with various levels of authority, and also reduce printing waste in the classroom or staffroom.
- Print and copy quota management – Admins can monitor user transactions, identify where resources are being wasted and grant print privileges, enforce policies and apply quotas on users, groups or OUs. Budget cycles can be reset daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly.
- Print and copy tracking – Monitor and record all printing activity (who is printing by user, department or device), what is being printed (document name, page count, color/B&W) and measure the costs.
- Centralized authentication for device access – Seamless integration with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 in addition to the directprint.io internal directory, enables secure user authentication and access control, ensuring only authorized users can access print devices and data.
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Get started today with a 30-day free trial of directprint.io to see if you can print smarter, save time and reduce printing costs for your K-12 school or school district. All our great features are included and all setup support is provided free of charge.