Print management solutions

[Huddleston, Paul]

At our Library, we have a lab with roughly 140 stations in it that all print to 4 printers at a central desk located in the lab.  As it stands, when a student prints, the job immediately charges their account and goes to the printer.  Our lab workers take those jobs and sort them on the counter according to the Student ID and place them on the desk where they are retrieved.  In a small setting, or one with a low print volume, this would be ideal and would work fine.  The nature of our lab makes it the highest volume lab on campus by a long shot.  Compound this with the fact that students wait until 10-15 minutes before the hour to print since that is when they leave to go to class and you can imagine the log jam that happens.

Now, to my question:

What product or solution are some of you using that have experienced the same thing as us?  We have looked at PaperCut for the backend management, but were wondering about the physical release stations that are able to take campus cards or even debit cards (which seems like a solution that would help with guest/visitor printing).  Are there some solutions that are affordable and effective at handling this?  We would like to think that this would be a way that students could print to a single queue and then the release station they choose would determine the printer that actually printed the job.

Thanks in advance,

Paul Huddleston
Network and Systems Manager
Mississippi State University Libraries






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2016-02-23
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