G2 Winter report names PaperCut #1 in Print
To steal a line or two from their website, the Indiana Biosciences Research Institute [IBRI] is “a leading translational research institute that advances academic and industry science through collaboration to improve patient health outcomes”.
What does that mean? To paraphrase IBRI’s Director of IT & Applications, Jacob Smith, IBRI is neither a corporate entity, nor an academic entity. “We try to bring those two worlds together,” Smith says, when I caught up with him in a recent chat. “So that the research the academic folks are doing can be taken to the next step towards commercialization.”
In other words, ensuring that research isn’t just “thought research” — it helps people.
Our talk was about IBRI’s experiences in using PaperCut’s cloud-native print management solution, PaperCut Hive.
Tell us a little about yourself
I’m the director of IT and applications. I’ve been with the organization for just over five years now.
What was your printing problem?
Our problem was we needed a way to not have confidential information left at the printers.
We also needed to know how many pages were being printed by each individual so we could do cost recovery.
So having a secure print solution was essential to making sure we could print those documents safely, and not have eyes on something that shouldn’t be seen.
How did you solve your problem?
We worked with Sharp Business Solutions here in Minneapolis as the provider of the printers and told them what we needed to do. And there were a couple of solutions that they proposed to us.
I don’t think PaperCut was the first one because we started off with a different product that they offered. But we ran into several problems with that, especially with our members, because it was tied to our Active Directory. The members of the small companies we worked with aren’t in our Active Directory group, so managing them having access to the printers was not something we could do.
“It doesn’t matter what network we’re connected to; we can print to PaperCut Hive and then release that to our printers.”
Jacob Smith, Director of IT & Applications, IBRI
And it also didn’t keep track of print counts the way PaperCut does. One of the things that we do with our members is charge them after a certain number of pages for what they’re printing. Just to make sure people don’t go wild with printing off large manuals and putting that at their desk. Or if they do, there’ll be some cost recovery for it. So, cost recovery was an additional reason we wanted PaperCut Hive.
So, we tried the other solution, we ran into problems, and then went back to Sharp and said, “This isn’t working for us, what else can we do?”
And they suggested PaperCut Hive.
How was the PaperCut Hive installation experience?
I’ve had very little that needed to be installed on premises for PaperCut Hive. The Super Node is installed on a server that we’d already be running anyway. And the Standard Nodes, being on endpoint devices, those are devices we’re going to have on our network anyway. So, there’s been very little that we’ve had to install on premises.
We rely on the Cloud Node for printing quite a bit. It doesn’t matter what network we’re connected to; we can print to PaperCut Hive and then release that to our printers.
What’s been the outcome of switching to PaperCut Hive for you and your team?
With PaperCut Hive, we don’t have confidential information left at printers. We know who’s printing, how many pages, so we can recover those costs when we need to.
PaperCut Hive nudges us to print in black and white, which saves us a lot in our printing.
Our final “go” was PaperCut Hive proved that it could meet all of things we needed it to do without having a high overhead. And that included both our employees and the non-employees who are on our site.
I would highly recommend PaperCut Hive as the solution for meeting most needs.
