Posted by Jordan Pusey
Most organizations are all too aware of the role that information plays in making decisions with enterprise-wide impact. The more information that’s available, the better those decisions tend to be. And when it comes to gathering information on their print environments, those same organizations often look to print tracking software to address the deficiencies in traditional print management solutions like direct IP printing or print servers, which offer little to nothing in the way of monitoring, reporting and auditing.
As a first step in their effort to track print jobs, that’s certainly commendable. But print environments are complex beasts, and print tracking can be equally complex. Assuming, for starters, that your print tracking solution integrates fully and seamlessly with your existing print management software and your wider IT environment, the biggest challenge lies in both the amount and the quality of the data that’s captured.
Because it’s not enough just to gather what amounts to a print queue history. When you track print jobs, you need to know the fine print: Who initiated the job and when? Which workstation was used? Where did it print? Was the job in color or black and white? That’s the granular type of detail that helps you parse things down to the user level.
In an enterprise-scale organization, however, aggregating that much detail can have a serious downside. Before you know it, you’re drowning in information. That’s why the final hurdle in any print tracking initiative lies in organizing the data in a way that’s useful and makes sense even to non-experts. Being able to easily arrange and analyze that data gives you a 20,000-foot view of your print environment, including longitudinal printing trends as well as consolidation and cost-saving opportunities.
PrinterLogic’s next-generation print management software has print tracking as one of its core features, which means that the ability to track print jobs on both the macro and micro levels (and everything in between) is deeply integrated into our solution. Whereas other print tracking solutions tend to sit atop your existing print management software, which risks compatibility issues, PrinterLogic gathers vital print job information at the source—including USB-connected printers.
As a result, with PrinterLogic you have seamless integration along with easy, at-a-glance access to an incredible amount of comprehensive print tracking data. But, as I mentioned, that’s only part of the equation. The key is to make that data work for you.
That’s where our print management software truly stands out. PrinterLogic’s reporting and auditing features give you the tools you need to extract relevant insights from your print tracking data. For example, you can use PrinterLogic to determine:
- Which printers see the heaviest usage. Underutilized printers can be consolidated or rotated into different placement to maximize the life of your hardware fleet.
- How much print jobs are costing you. By tying the real-world cost of printing to current usage, you can identify significant cost-saving opportunities.
- Who initiated certain print jobs. Did someone print out a document labeled “classified”? At what time and on what machine?
PrinterLogic also lets you organize and publish that data as you see fit. You can arrange print jobs by user, machine or group, for instance, and then have reports automatically emailed to the relevant decision makers. If a user is regularly printing large color jobs outside of business hours, or a manager wants to know how much his or her department is spending on printing, you can easily pinpoint that information and act on it with the print tracking functionality in PrinterLogic’s leading print management software.