Schools and universities face a few unique challenges when it comes to printing. They have to deal with crazy fluxes in seasonal print demand, high-print volumes, diverse user groups, and permission levels, not to mention the obvious need for quotas and cost controls. Students will more or less keep printing stuff until you tell them to stop (or make them pay for it), which means campus printing, if left unchecked, is like a giant money vortex sucking up your admin budget.
So how can print queue management help? Let’s find out.
What is print queue management?
Print queue management is basically the process of organizing, prioritizing, and overseeing print jobs in a networked print environment. It manages the sequence in which documents are printed, and helps balance the load between various network printers (ensuring no performance bottlenecks). That’s the idea in a nutshell, but print queue management also has a ton of flow-on benefits, as we’ll see below.
What are some of the challenges of campus printing?
Universities and schools need to manage high print volumes, seasonal server stress, document security, waste reduction, and user experience across students, staff, and guests. All at the same time. It’s not easy, especially when your campus IT team is drowning in tickets.
Demand spikes. Surges in print demand around exam times, in particular, can place a real strain on campus print networks.
Diverse user needs. Campus networks need to accommodate faculty, students, and guests, with each group having complicated permissions and resource allocation.
Budget constraints. Limited funding for new hardware and software makes it challenging to upgrade aging equipment.
Security requirements. Protecting sensitive data (e.g. assignments, grades, student records) is an essential part of data protection compliance.
Device compatibility. Campus print networks need to support pretty much every device, network config, and operating system under the sun.
The benefits of print queue management
By automatically prioritizing certain jobs, or fielding jobs out to the right printers, queue management makes your whole print environment more efficient. Smoother. Less stressful. Schools and universities handle huge volumes of print jobs from students, staff, and guests. With good print queue management policies in place, high-priority tasks, like urgent exam materials, can be processed first, maximizing your resources and making sure essential tasks aren’t delayed.
Reducing bottlenecks
With managed queues, jobs get distributed more evenly across the print network, reducing wait times and improving the user experience. Print queue management also goes hand-in-hand with secure print release , which means users can find the best printer for the job – and then collect their documents securely.
Lower IT overhead
With print queue management up and running, your campus IT team can spend less time troubleshooting or manually setting up devices and more time working on high-value tasks. Print queue management gives your sysadmins centralized control, along with real-time activity data, so they can spot any overloaded MFDs on the network.
Boost user experience
All organizations are after a better user experience, but universities and schools need to simultaneously please several different user groups at once. The printing needs of a lecturer will be different from those of a student, or a guest. Print queue management basically makes sure that large or complex print jobs don’t hold up smaller ones, reducing wait times and optimizing device usage.
Improve cost control
With print queue management, admins can quickly set upset and manage print quotas and permissions, then segregate these based on user role or department. This discourages unnecessary printing, which reduces waste and saves you budget. With pull printing , you also minimize the chance of abandoned print jobs, which are a waste of paper and ink (not to mention a security risk).
Ensure print security
Speaking of security, print queue management allows sysadmins to track and log every single job on the network. This obviously supports compliance with data protection regulations, and makes audits a breeze (well, as breezy as regulatory audits with the prospect of financial penalties can be). With print tracking comes print accountability, helping your teams quickly identify any security breaches on the network.
Scalability
As the campus expands, either in student population of physical locations, the print environment gets more complicated, which increases the chance of stuff like bottlenecks, performance issues, and print errors. With efficient queue management, handled from one central location, you can easily scale printing resources without excessive infrastructure upgrades. Always a plus.
