While most business environments are striving to reduce their reliance on paper-based documentation, the education sector (for the most part) is yet to follow this trend. This is due to the heavy reliance students and staff have on printers for their paper-based output. To accommodate this demand, the IT Department are often tasked with assisting students and other users in connecting their personal devices to the network printers. Considering the sheer number of users, campuses and devices, as well as the manufacturer-specific installation processes that may be required for a multi-vendor print fleet, it is unsurprising that this can be a time consuming task. Time which would be better spent elsewhere.
Wheaton College, based in Massachusetts had a similar issue, their IT department was overstretched assisting thousands of students and staff in connecting their devices to the network printer, so they needed to find a solution to free up their valuable time.
After examining various solutions on the market, FollowMe® by Ringdale® was selected due to its easy–to-implement award-winning, mobile printing technology. Following the installation of FollowMe, users can now print via email or web from any location, and then authenticate at the printer to release the print job. The FollowMe solution means users no longer need assistance connecting to the network printers, freeing up valuable IT resources. In addition, the IT Department now has full tracking, cost management and security enablement.
Wheaton College has also experienced the added benefit of dramatically reduced print volumes due to users having to authenticate at the printer to release their print jobs. This has in turn helped reduce the opportunity for documents to be left at the printer, as well as allowing users extra time to cancel unwanted documents.