March 2, 2020
Topics: ITL Services

What is Managed Print Services?

Managed Print Services (MPS) is a modernized printing system being introduced to schools throughout the district. An MPS enabled school has one or more multifunction print/copy/scan/fax units that are connected to a central printing queue (i.e. the list of documents sent by staff and students for printing) with a product called PaperCut. PaperCut gathers a user’s current printing information when they login to the multifunction device and allows them to release or delete the jobs they have sent. For schools that already have Managed Print Services a complete user manual is available here: https://www.sd61.bc.ca/staff-support-portal/managed-print-services/

Why MPS?

MPS offers several notable advantages for individual users, our district and the environment:

Convenience

MPS allows users to choose where and when their printing will occur. With MPS the following hassles are eliminated (or greatly reduced) for all users:

• Choosing the correct printer: There is only one printer to select regardless of the number of physical printers in the school. Once the job is sent staff and students can use any device to print it. NOTE: Other options, such as Print to PDF, are still available from the print menu of applications that support them.
• Racing to the printer: No more wondering who may have stolen your worksheets, your printing does not happen until you are standing in front of the machine.
• Entering Department ID’s: Department codes are not compatible with MPS. Staff and students use Fobs, PINs, or district credentials to print.
• Waiting for a huge print job to finish: If a printer is being used for a large scale copy job users can simply go to another printer (if one is available) or come back later when the machine is free. Of course, if the printer is your school’s version of the water cooler, you can still gather around and have a gab.
• Down-time: the multifunction devices are newer and easier to service. Overall, they will be far more reliable than the printers they are replacing, and should spend less time requiring repairs.

Increased Security

Staff who regularly print confidential information about students or other staff members can be confident that this information will not be accidentally printed without their consent.

Reduced Waste

MPS allows the district to save money and lower our impact on the environment in the following ways:

• Jobs that are not authorized for printing by the user are discarded by the system overnight—this greatly reduces accidental printing.
  Users have an opportunity to review the job, or stop it in mid-print if they added extra zeros to the number of copies required—as in “Oops, did I type 5000 copies, I only need 5!”
• Duplicate jobs are no longer necessary—as in “Now which printer did I send that job to? It’s not here. I must have sent it upstairs; or maybe I forgot to send the job. What a mystery! Better go back to my computer and print it again.”
• Current generation multifunction devices use far less toner than older laser printers which reduces the number or plastic toner cartridges consumed, not to mention the cost of the toner itself.
• All colour prints are reproduced with toner rather than inkjet, which also greatly reduces costs and environmental impact.
• Energy is saved at the school with less printing being done on a more efficient device.
• Carbon emissions and energy consumption are reduced at the paper mill due to less demand for paper production.
• Trees are saved by reducing the amount of paper wasted.

Here are some stats from a summary report for the period covering Dec 31, 2016 to Feb 24, 2020 give a sense of the scale of savings the district has seen so far (NOTE: These stats have only been collected from active MPS locations):

Although it is difficult to give an accurate comparison of cost per page (due to the number of variables involved) our Finance and IT departments did come up with an estimate for black and white printing on the new multifunction printers ($ 0.0062/page) vs. our previous stand alone printers  ($ 0.03/page). Using these numbers we can see how much would be saved on a run of 500 pages: