🔎 Admin console: Reduce Waste > Promote Black and White / Auto Black and White
You know when you walk into the conference room and sheepishly hand out the most beautiful looking, lavishly colored, and overly professional meeting agenda notes? We’ve all done it, and I’ve certainly wished that someone was there to remind me ‘Hey, this is just going to be used in a 20 min meeting, print it it black and white!’.
With PaperCut Hive and Pocket, you can suggest black and white printing or force black and white printing. If this is your organization’s first time applying printing rules around toner and ink-saving, then start your revolution off gently with suggestions - hopefully people will do the right thing! People generally have an (ahem) inkling that they don’t need to print in color, but sometimes a reminder in-app is worth its weight in gold!
Encouraging (promoting) printing behavior
This option lets you suggest black and white (grayscale) printing to your users, depending on what they are printing. However, they can override this suggestion using the mobile app (or the MFD login when using PaperCut Hive) and choose to continue to print the document in color if they prefer. This is a great way to remind people to print in grayscale without too much inconvenience!
You can choose how frequently users are prompted (you don’t have to show the message for every single print job) and what size print jobs (how many pages) trigger the notification to be displayed.
Promoting black and white printing by popping up a suggestion to users when they print documents in color.
Enforcing (automatically applying) printing behavior
This option lets you automatically convert your users’ documents to black and white. Your users won’t get a choice in the matter, but you can also optionally choose to notify your users about the change when they release their job - that way they’re not surprised when they see the document has been printed in black and white instead of color!
Automatically convert all your users’ print jobs to black and white. In this case the user will also get a handy popup to let them know that the document is now black and white!
User notifications
When the user goes to release their print job from the mobile app, (or if they’re using PaperCut Hive, from the MFD or copier), they’ll see the notification about the conversion.
If you use the promotion method, then they’ll see the notification as well as the options to Keep in Color or Convert to B&W - it’s their choice!
If you select auto-convert with the notify option, they’ll see the notification and they can then select Print anyway.
FAQs
Can I enforce suggestions or automatic conversions based on user groups?
Does the percentage of jobs apply to the percentage of all jobs, or to a % of jobs per user?
Good question! The percentage applies to the overall organization’s jobs - so just like the claw-grabber game in the arcade at the end of the pier, there’s a certain amount of luck involved.
In theory if you set the percentage to 25% and your organization prints a lot but one person prints once a month - they could by complete chance, never see that suggestion popup. However, the higher the percentage used, the chances of not seeing the suggestion dramatically decrease, the more the person prints. I feel a mathematical white paper coming on…
Can't I just let my users choose their format when they release their job?
Related topics
Configure black and white (grayscale) printing
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