University printing environments are notorious for being complex, decentralized and high-volume IT nightmares. They’re where you often find operational inefficiencies, long wait times and excessive print costs. And partly that’s down to the unique needs of higher education printing: multiple user roles, printing across campuses and departments, seasonal print volumes, server stress, and students printing way, way too much.
Managing print queues across multiple university departments requires a centralized, secure, and scalable approach to streamline operations for students, faculty, and staff.
By implementing smart print policies, automation and proactive monitoring, universities can reduce waste and improve user experience at the same time. The holy grail.
Here’s how to do it.
Understand the scope of your campus printing problems
You can’t streamline your print queues if you don’t know what they look like. So before implementing solutions, universities should really assess their current print challenges. Things like:
- Overloaded print queues in high-traffic areas (e.g. libraries and computer labs).
- Idle or underutilized printers in less active departments.
- Paper and toner waste due to abandoned or excessive print jobs.
- Long wait times and frustration among students and staff. Don’t worry about trying to identify this one. It will make itself known…
- Security risks from unattended print jobs, especially when it comes to sensitive financial or student data.
We recommend conducting a print usage audit as a first step. It’ll help you analyse peak usage times, average print job sizes, and department-specific demands. Once you know what you print environment looks like, streamlining things will become much easier.
Roll out centralized print queue management
If there’s a silver bullet for campus printing, it’s centralized print queue management and automated job routing, all managed from a single dashboard.
Having a unified print management system allows your IT teams to oversee and optimize print queues across all departments. This means dynamic print job routing to available
printers and real-time monitoring of print requests and usage, not to mention role-based access control to enforce department-specific rules.
To streamline your print queues, deploy cloud-based or networked print management software ( hello there ) to centralize print control and eliminate bottlenecks. Bonus points if your vendor specializes in higher education print solutions .
Leverage print policies to boost efficiency
Implementing university-wide print policies ensures fair usage and cost savings, and it’s such an easy win. For best practice, you should configure print policies directly within the print management system to automate enforcement without manual intervention. You want as much cross-department self-service functionality as possible, freeing up IT for more higher-level, strategic stuff.
Print policies can also help with things like default duplex printing (to reduce paper waste), restricting color printing to authorized users or specific departments, setting print quotas for students and staff, and enforcing auto-deletion of abandoned print jobs in the queue.
Use load balancing across printers
Universities face some unique printing challenges. The first being uneven printer usage: more than most organizations, university users tend to stick to familiar MFDs, which can cause some serious bottlenecks during peak usage times (like right before those crucial, end-of-semester exams). Automated load balancing uses real-time job routing to distribute printing tasks efficiently across the university’s networked printers, preventing long wait times for jobs. This not only frees up your network, but it avoids machine burnout – where you have one printer doing the work of 10, running quickly through its lifespan while other machines sit idle.
With automated job rerouting, you can direct large or queued jobs to the best printer, not just the closest printer. This functionality also allows department-based load distribution, so you can prioritise essential academic print jobs. You can even make peak-hour adjustments to optimize printing based on real-time demand. Nifty.
Embrace secure print release
Secure print release (also known as secure pull printing) means authenticating your print job at the MFD. With secure print release, a job can only be released by its authorised user. This manual intervention boosts security and massively reduces unnecessary printing at the same time.
Here’s how it works: users send print jobs to a central queue and release them from any printer, either via their student ID, PIN codes or a mobile app. The job is released, and an audit trail is created. This is great for legislative and data protection compliance, especially when the auditors come a-knocking. It also means that sensitive university documents or student records aren’t accidentally left sitting in a paper tray for anyone to read.
Provide self-service options for users
Trust us, your IT department hates being the printer traffic cops. By empowering students and faculty with self-service printing, you reduce IT workload, improve your user experience, and boost the network’s overall efficiency. And this doesn’t have to come with a compromise on security, either. Things like web-based print submissions from personal devices, mobile print release using campus apps, and cloud-based printing for remote learners are all easy to setup and 100% secure (when properly configured).
To really streamline your campus print environment, we recommend implementing BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) printing and mobile print solutions to allow seamless printing from laptops, tablets and smartphones.
Monitor and optimize continuously
A print environment is only as good as its analytics. Regular monitoring helps identify inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement, which are both huge for higher education.
Key metrics to track include print volume by department and time of day, printer downtime and error rates, plus cost-per-print and supply consumption. Use print analytics dashboards to track trends, adjust policies and identify areas for optimization. Seriously, with all this info at your fingertips, you’ll be able to quickly spot which departments are printing too much, or how to maximize your server resources based on print volume. There’s no such thing as too much visibility over your campus print network.
Communicate with departments and users
A successful print queue management strategy is like 40% technology and 60% communication. You can have the most optimised, sophisticated setup going around, but if your students don’t trust it, or your faculty doesn’t know how to use it, the whole thing’s just a waste of time. We recommend an ongoing process of communication and user training, including clear print policies for university students and faculty, education on self-service and secure printing options, and gathering feedback from departments to refine policies and improve experiences.
A few things you can do; send users monthly usage reports, post guidelines on university portals, and engage departments when it comes to policy updates. It’ll pay dividends down the track, and probably avoid 90% of user-based problems.
By implementing these strategies, universities can reduce costs, improve user experience, and enhance security across all departments. Investing in proactive print management now will prevent inefficiencies and ensure a seamless printing experience for years to come.
