Printing Solutions for the Education Industry

Schools are pretty orderly, right? With its grades, classes, tracks, departments, periods, semesters and all the other ways it’s categorized and arranged, your average K-12 or college often looks like a model of efficiency and organization.

From the outside, at least.

IT sees a different side of things. Students move from classroom to classroom throughout the day. During the school year, especially in higher education, every semester can bring a massive shift in where each student and teacher needs to be. And then every year you have students leaving the system and new ones entering it. That creates an ultra-mobile, ever-changing pool of end users.

Providing IT services to a user base that’s in constant motion can be tough. When you’re dealing with printers, it gets even tougher.

Why? Because printers are still rooted in a static model—which is to say that printers were basically designed to connect to a single desktop workstation through a cable. The mobile revolution is at odds with that model. Today you’ve got hundreds of free-floating devices interfacing with multiple network printers.

It’s not like this is something that only affects schools. Most enterprise print solutions don’t have this figured out, either.

But schools and districts face extra challenges because they’re working with fewer resources. Budgets are tighter. IT staffs are smaller. They’re dealing with legacy hardware in locations that are scattered all over a town or city. Or larger. In the case of Lamar Consolidated Independent School District (read the case study here), you’re talking about an area spanning 400 square miles.

That’s why print solutions for schools have to be able to meet these extra challenges. Specifically, they need to:

  • Simplify print management: Even when everything’s in flux, print management has to be a total breeze. Students and faculty need to be able to print easily no matter where they are. And admins should be able to configure those printer assignments as quickly and as smoothly as possible.
  • Seamlessly implement next-gen features: Adding a feature like mobile printing or pull printing shouldn’t involve having to scrap your existing print solution. It also shouldn’t mean having to fork out a ton of money for something that requires more infrastructure or can’t promise full compatibility with your other print software.
  • Make it easy to monitor print activity: Whether buildings are spread across a campus or an entire district, print solutions for schools have to provide visibility over the whole environment. For cost-saving reasons, admins should be able to tell where print volumes are high or which department is always printing in color.

PrinterLogic is the smart choice for printing in education
PrinterLogic’s serverless printing software is a leading choice among enterprise printing solutions. So it might be easy to think that it’s best suited for corporate environments. But PrinterLogic’s unique architecture is exactly what makes it so versatile. It’s able to meet all the unique IT challenges of educational environments, making it the perfect print solution for schools.

Migrating to PrinterLogic from a direct-IP or print-server environment is rapid and almost effortless. Once PrinterLogic is installed, your K-12 school, community college or university can:

  • Eliminate print servers: The huge advantage of serverless printing software is that you can shut down all your print servers. Yet that doesn’t mean compromising on print functionality. At the same time as you’re eliminating this expensive, hard-to-maintain infrastructure, you’re also creating more uptime, more flexibility and centralized management.
  • Implement mobile printing: PrinterLogic’s optional mobile printing feature lets you roll out print capabilities to all your mobile, Chromebook and BYOD users regardless of the brand of their devices. There’s no software for them to install, and it works with any network printer (even legacy models).
  • Add secure pull printing: Just like mobile printing, PrinterLogic can enhance your print environment with secure pull-printing functionality. This helps to ensure that confidential documents like tests, transcripts and teacher evaluations aren’t left sitting in the output tray.
  • Monitor print activity everywhere: Print auditing is one of the features that makes PrinterLogic a top choice among enterprise print solutions, and it’s just as valuable in educational settings. Use it to keep tabs on the who, what, when, where and how of printing across the entire school. Or set it up to automatically email print-activity reports to department heads and school administrators.

Along with Lamar CISD, educational organizations like the Fulton County School System (read the case study here), Oklahoma City Community College (case study) and La Roche College (case study) have all switched to PrinterLogic’s serverless printing software. Northwest Area Education Agency opted for PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud), our cloud-based print solution for schools and other enterprise-scale organizations (case study).

In every instance, PrinterLogic saved them time and money by simplifying their print environments. Lamar CISD pegged its savings from PrinterLogic at about $20,000 per year.

Want to see the magic that our serverless printing software can work as your K-12 print solution? Then check out this white paper we wrote on the subject. A lot of the tips and topics in there apply to higher ed as well. Or better still, sign up today to demo our print solution and see exactly how it performs. It’s free for 30 days.