Restricting Printing

[Pigabuff]

Hi,
I work in a school and we have large volumes of users and computers. The problem we have is that teachers are printing their class hand-outs/sets on the network printers, which is wasting resourses and costing the school a bit of money. The stupid thing is that the school has some really good repographics facilites, which would make the cost of this type of printing cheap (in comparision). However, as you can imagine, the teachers are lazy and stupid, and can't be bothered to walk all the way over to repographics (but it's not really that far, lol).

So, the thing I need to ask is this; do any of you know of any way to restrict the number of copies per print job that a user does (in group policy, for example), or any piece of software that will do this job for me?

I mean I've found a few pieces of really good software that control/monitor printer usage, but they seem to control everything else apart from this one thing, which is obvioulsly quite frustrating becuase we have a program to do all the other stuff, it's just this one function we need. =/

Thanks for you time,
Rob

 

[feriso]

.....However, as you can imagine, the teachers are lazy and stupid, and can't be bothered to walk all the way over to repographics (but it's not really that far, lol)......

You just tell my wife that - she'll hang you by your nuts.....

Sometimes the copiers aren't quick enough......

 

[Burnsy2023]

There is Ranger print management which I think does what you want, but it's not cheap.

I'd be interested what you find though, we have a similar problem with people printing to printers they shouldn't be.

Burnsy

 

[Baggins_451]

Used this PCounter for years

 

[M0KUJ1N]

We usePCounter too.
The pricing I think is mainly based on number of host machines though you can receive quotes from the company.

Obviously Im not going to tell people how to run their networks but other options (which can be provided by PCounter) would be printing allowances or charging users to print to certain printers- prohibiting access completely to certain printers may end up creating more problems than it solves.

And before you ask, I don't work for PCounter, in fact I preferred GPAS but that only runs on Novell.

 

[Pigabuff]

You just tell my wife that - she'll hang you by your nuts.....

Sometimes the copiers aren't quick enough......

[puts nuts under lock and key]

...and the copiers that reprographics have are quick let me assure you

There is Ranger print management which I think does what you want, but it's not cheap.

I'd be interested what you find though, we have a similar problem with people printing to printers they shouldn't be.

Burnsy

Yeah, we have ranger printer manager already, it does it's job nicly, but it doesn't do this one thing we want it to
With printing to printers they shouldn't, we have setup a logon script that automatically adds the printers that they should use at a certain location. However, on the teachers laptops are unrestricted on which printers they can use, so we still a few issues, but we have told the teachers how to find the printers they want to use, and they printers we have offered to them are ones that everyone can use, so it's not a big problem for us.


and in response to the suggestion of PCounter, I shall have a look, thank you.

 

[Pigabuff]

Well just to keep you up to date (if you care, or are bored =P), I emailed the company that makes PCounter, and they responded saying "...thanks for your query, I have forwarded your questions onto our technical department, and they will respond to your questions and give you a quote for PCounter soon..." (or something like that anyway).

and so far, they havn't responded and i even sent them an email today, just to see if they have an answer =/. I know I may be being a bit impatient, but 5 working days is long enough to just find out if your product does one simple task, and they said soon, would it be hard to imagine 'soon' being more than a week?

 

[Dr_Evil]

Wouldn't it be best to give them a phonecall?

 

[Unluckyalf]

I too can recommend PCounter. Also there is Print Audit that does similar. Both offer time restricted trial periods.

PCounter works by modifying all the printer ports on the server to PCounter ports

Print Audit is a little more invasive by requiring a client rollout to each workstation (can of course be automated) but can also capture printers on LPT/USB ports locally attached to workstations.

One other possible option though, depending on the hardware, is to look so see if printer supports Department codes. Most of the Multi Function devices now-a-days have this facility built-in FOC and you have hand out different access codes to different users/departments with b/w and colour restrictions. I doubt though that desktop printers would have this feature.

 

[feriso]

Wouldn't it be best to give them a phonecall?

Seconded - emails can be forgotten and things like this are dealth with a lot more quickly over the phone

 

[Pigabuff]

Seconded - emails can be forgotten and things like this are dealth with a lot more quickly over the phone

I agree, but i've had phone calls with company like this that just go round in circles, and you get nowhere. Dell is the perfect example, my friend had someone reading from a sheet, blatanly, and this was suppose to be technical support the guy did not have a clue what he was going on about, and his problem wasn't really that technical.