Good afternoon, dear colleagues.
A little bit about yourself
Let me introduce myself, my name is Alexey. I have been working in the field of IT for more than 15 years and has gone all the way from Assistant Admin to manager in a rather large international campaign.
Recently, I realized that I had accumulated quite a lot of interesting decisions and cases that it would be useful to share.
Corporate print
Some time ago (5 or 7 years old), the question arose about the effectiveness of using printing systems in a company, amid growing bills for filling cards and servicing printers. We sat with colleagues and decided that we need to collect statistics. Monitor about 3 months. As a result, they identified the main users of devices and departments.
As a result, it turned out that only 2 departments completely loaded the printers, the rest rather collected dust and ate funds for maintenance. As a result, began to consider what would be more profitable. After a short brainstorming, several scenarios were formed.
Several options were considered:
- The use of more productive devices but put one printer on the department.
- Put the printer only to key employees and limit printing.
- Large MFP as the main printers.
The first 2 options were marked as unpromising. Therefore, we will not stop on them. But the third will take a closer look.
In this case, we solved several problems at once:
- Savings on consumables - often the cost of consumables per printed sheet is much lower.
- Saving on maintenance of equipment - service of the printing equipment was transferred to outsourcing. As usual, the terms of the contract - a trade secret. But I can say that we do the scheduled maintenance once a quarter + the wizard’s departure for the next working day in case of an accident (the number of departures is also limited)
- Corporate scanner - useful stuff. Sends a scan message to the user's email address. Of course, with an abundance of number of settings such as resolution, file type, etc.
During testing, we tried Konica Minolta, Kyosera, Canon devices.
And here are the conclusions we have turned out:
- Konica Minolta - Smart devices, work very stably and quality of the press very good. Cons: expensive consumables, components and service.
- Canon has good print quality, but the service is expensive, as is the cost of the devices themselves.
- Kyosera - ease of operation, the price of devices, the price of consumables and maintenance.
As you understand, we stopped at Kyosera TaskAlfa, now in the park models 4501, 4052, 3252.
Our case
As soon as we began to install Large MFPs, the question arose of how to separate print jobs from different users. Here we used 2 solutions: Mailbox Unit and Private (Secure) Print.
Mailbox Unit.
A handy thing, unfortunately, the Canon device was no longer available, Konica Minolta stopped producing them (or they were not supplied in the Russian Federation) in production, we put the Kyosera devices.
It looks like this:
Used in cases of need to print "continuously" - the user sent a bunch of documents to print, comes to the machine and collects his documents from his unit. Stand in sales and customer service.
Private Print and Secure Print.
In fact, this is one principle of work from different manufacturers - when sending to print, the task is assigned an identifier indicating that the user can access tasks from the device. The solution is fully controlled by the device driver and does not require additional investments.
Secure print
Secure Print is a Konica-Minolta solution. The setup is pretty simple.
From the server (client) side:
In this case, the user, when sending to print, will receive a request for an identifier: username and password.
We use an arbitrary value, set by the user in 2 ways: 1 - a pop-up window appears on every print, 2 - In the printer properties on the client machine, in which case all print jobs will go to the printer with this identifier.
On the machine:To print a document sent to the printer, follow these steps:
- On the side navigation bar, click the Home button. In the printer menu, select "User Box".
- Select the item "System" and click "Use file":
- Select "Secure Print" and enter the document ID and password that you entered on the computer:
- In the menu that opens, you will see all the documents that you have sent to print and have not yet printed.
Select the required document from the list of documents, select it by pressing. The “Print” button will appear on the right. To print, click the "Print" button.
- Next, click the "Start" button.
Private print
Private print is a Kyosera solution. Does the same thing as secure print, but the implementation is different. The username is the username and all that is required is to enter a pin.
Server side (client) setup:
On the device go to the section Task box - Private Print, select the user, enter the pin and task. (Unfortunately, at the time of writing there are no beautiful skins).
In irode all is well, but not to the end
This configuration completely satisfied the needs of a couple of hundred users over a long period of time. But not all good things last forever. One day it was decided to change the office and in the place of one extensive floor we received 3 floors of a separate building. The move itself went according to plan, without major problems. But after several months, we realized that the existing system had ceased to justify itself - some devices worked with a higher load than planned, as a result of which users had to return to their workplace and print to another device.
In principle, not deadly, but unpleasant. Then an understanding came that it would no longer be possible to postpone the introduction of the follow me system.
The deadline for replacing the lion's part of the multifunction device was just right, and we decided to bring all printing systems to a single standard.
Kyosera MFPs were used as Devices, as the most cost-effective again in our situation.
Follow me printing
And began a project to implement the solution with the possibility of Follow me printing.
Follow me - the main idea of this solution - the ability to print the sent document on any printer upon request. Assignment, how would follow you.
Usually this option is part of an integrated print management system.
The advantages of the introduction of such a system, from my point of view, are obvious:
- Users do not depend on the printer.
- You can safely stop the devices on THAT.
- Lack of queues eager to get printed documents.
- Unified device interface.
There are quite a few solutions of this nature, but since we decided to use Kyosera devices, we took the conditionally “native” MyQ system.
About how we implemented it, I will write in the next section.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask them - I am always happy to answer them.