Blade Watch

So I attend different press briefings every now and again, and I’ve heard the PR bit, the green bit, which included the ‘Energy Efficient printing’ or green printing. I have to say at the time it wasn’t that I wasn’t impressed it was more a ‘nice thing’ and wondered who’s implemented it. More importantly the thought of having to swipe my card to get that document what an extra amount of effort.

Anyway, Chris was on the phone and mentioned that his organization has deployed it. In essence the following happens.

• Chris presses print on his desktop.
• This sends his job to a shared print server
• Chris walks to the printer (when he’s finished his coffee)
• Swipes his door pass on the printer and the printer then displays “hello Chris, what document do you want printed?”
• Chris then selects his document and presses print.

We discussed it and both like it, (I confess he gave me a demo on Tuesday night before dinner) though I have yet to decide if me being shown energy efficient printing in action is cool or a bit over diligent.

Anyway, the reasons we like it:

• Less wasted paper – people printing stuff and forgetting it.
• Less printing in error jobs  – when you realize what you’ve printed isn’t formatted correctly/margins need reset.
• Fewer toners used as people only print what they have too.
• Chris was talking about it empowering IT to reduce the number of standalone printers – though this will depend on a number of factors.
• Departmental based printing – your department or cost center only pays for the printing it needs to rather than the whole shared printer cartridge purchasing debate. A per unit cost could be billed to the cost center avoiding those “you can’t print on MY printer, it’s MY toner” conversations.

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