An Ohio college finds PaperCut makes the grade when it comes to ease and efficiency

Clark State uses PaperCut to manage printing for faculty, staff, and students. Each student receives a fixed quota per semester for printing for academic assignments and other personal printing needs, which they can top up at the bookshop if they need more. The system provides students with a release queue that includes printers in a variety of locations across all the college’s campuses. Once they send a job to the queue, they swipe their student ID card to print it out, courtesy of PaperCut’s Find-Me printing , and have the cost deducted from their semester quota.

The system for employees is similar, but Clark State also has a staffed copy center for larger jobs, so if they try to print a document over the maximum page number, they will be prompted to use the copy center instead in order to reduce the load on shared devices, allowing them to be as accessible to everyone as often as possible.

Nathan is happy with the versatility that PaperCut offers: “We have about five physical locations spread across three different counties. So, the flexibility is needed because there might be students or employees going from one location to another, and they can pick up their printing wherever they are.”

PaperCut also allows staff to prepare documents at home and then pick them up when they’re on campus. “For employees who have a managed laptop, the release queue is on there, and they can print to it from off-site. And then we also have a VDI infrastructure that employees can log into if they don’t have a laptop, and again that release queue is there.

Nathan is also a fan of the extra security that PaperCut offers. “(Previously) people would print out documents which would get mixed up with other documents and picked up on accident or not picked up at all, wasting paper and resources. This also improves security for printing documents with sensitive information. So, now having the documents release when you’re at the printer really helps with that sort of thing.”

Nathan has also modified some aspects of PaperCut to suit Clark State’s needs. He noticed that when people changed their email address, the system would create a whole new user profile. He wrote a PowerShell script that allowed the system to recognize the user ID regardless of a change in email address. This also ensured that a new employee’s printing would be logged against the right department for costs.

Another PaperCut advantage is its comprehensive reporting. As Nathan explains, “We have student workers who need access to some of the employee accounts as part of their student jobs. So, I have reports sent out every month to those supervisors saying, here are the students with access to your accounts. Let me know if anything changes; if someone needs removed so that they don’t have access to something they shouldn’t.”

It was also very valuable when the college replaced many of its printers in early 2020. “We were able to use the data from PaperCut – because we had four- or five-years data at that point – to determine where to place printers, where we could pull printers. And we were able to reduce our printer fleet significantly, ensuring we were meeting the needs of our stakeholders and doing so in a cost effective and efficient manner.”