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Executive Debrief
Where are your yields? The Prohibitive cost of Ink
You are not buying printer
assets; You are purchasing ink & toner operating
expenses. The chart to the right shows the
relative price comparisons of various liquids. Ink
overwhelmingly takes the prize as the most expensive
fluid - surpassing your pricey new year champagne!
And those gas prices we complain about are relatively
dirt cheep.
So are you throwing away ink?
I bet you are. Do you know what your yields are?
Be sure to read next month's newsletter.
That's managing your Printing
costs!
Grant's Tech Tip
pDesktop overview
pDesktop is a small agent that resides on the local PC and monitors printing activity in two ways. The first way is by monitoring print queue counts via the performance registry. This provides aggregate counts of the number of print jobs going through the local print queues. The second way is by monitoring activity through local print queues. In this way, all jobs sent to print queues are tracked. The PrinterRx database does not retain the actual job, just the job name and attributes.
This agent sends printing activity information for these desktop printers to the PrinterRx software on the server according to a specified schedule.
For more information refer
to:
PrinterRx
Support portal
PrinterRx training highlight
Automated install of
pDesktop using SMS
ISMS Software Distribution (or other software distribution package) tells its agents on network PCs to execute the appropriate script. The PC’s SMS agent runs as ‘SYSTEM’ and has the appropriate privileges to install software on the remote PC. SMS will then track what is installed, track the location of devices and can also upgrade or remove remotely installed software. SMS is provided by Microsoft but there are other providers of this type of software (BMC, CA, etc.). They all use the same basic techniques with the main difference being that some will combine a download feature rather than using a shared disk
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Where are your Assets?
Issues in Compliance
Our last
newsletter
discussed how best practices in optimizing
corporate printing. This month we will give ideas on how to get those
internal auditors off your back. Compliance
regulations are demanding that you need to know what are and
where are your assets.
Print management is becoming more of a concern in mid-size and large
corporations. Printer infrastructures and assets exhibit characteristics
similar to the unmanaged PC assets of yesteryear. No information exits about what
printing equipment is owned, where it is located or who is using it. When an
Internal Auditor approaches IT for the listing of all IT assets, their value and
location, often the only recourse is to walk around and manually compile. There is also no
central record of when the equipment went into service, the purchase cost,
maintenance records, service history, or service contracts.
This problem may be worse than it ever was with PCs because corporations have
failed to manage their printer assets, or worse stuck their head underground in
hopes that the problem goes away. But the auditor still comes to IT and is
coming more frequently because of the focus on regulatory issues.
Printing has historically been perceived as a low-level concern compared with other IT issues.
Printer assets are purchased on expense statements and
owned departmentally. As a result, corporations own an excessive number of printers – often between one and three users per printer – and have inadequate control of their purchase or disposal.
By implementing PrinterRx, your
organization will obtain a thorough knowledge of
printing assets, supplies, maintenance, and printing
costs. This information is crucial for a number of
reasons. Not only does this knowledge give you the power
to reduce your organization’s printing costs, it also
provides answers for regulatory purposes as demanded by
your auditors. Without knowing what assets you have, it
becomes impossible to comply with regulation
requirements set forth by governing bodies, such as
HIPAA and SOX. PrinterRx provides the audit trail and
information you need.
Get more
information on a PrinterRx solution
Managing Desktop Printers
Many
corporations have printers that are directly connected
to personal computers. A desktop printer is any printer
that is locally defined for individual use. This may be
may be parallel-attached, serial-attached, USB-attached,
or a network printer, although the non-network printers
are of most interest here. To truly manage your printing
assets, you need to monitor the printing activity going to these types of printers.
Best practices for managing Enterprise Printing does not recommend printing using direct-attached printers. Without going into detail, the logic for not using direct-attached printers includes: (1) desktop printers usually have the highest per page printing cost (TCO), (2) complex supplies management, (3) greater supplies inventory costs, (4) increased software management complexity, (5) added complexity for asset management, and (6) regulatory & compliance issues. Unfortunately, there is a proliferation of direct-attached printers, resulting in a challenge to organizations to wean employees off their desktop printers.
So you
have desktop printers to manage. What do you do?
If the printers must reside in the individual offices,
it is recommended to have them network attached.
At that point, they can be managed similar to the other
printers in your fleet.
Should
you not be able to network the printer and if you wish
to move away from printer chaos, software will be
required to manages these printers. Any software which
monitors usage of parallel-attached printers will reside
on the pc. That software should follow your
software asset management and deployment strategies.
The
primary objective is obtaining data on the numbers and
costs of these desktop printers. This
information is of interest to the financial decision
makers within your organization and critical for making
print strategy decisions.
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