Minehead Middle School in Somerset (UK) values PaperCut for its powerful scripting capabilities, its ease of use and its ability to integrate with the school’s fleet of Ricoh multi-function devices (MFDs).
The Minehead Middle School has a history dating back to 1929, operating previously as a grammar school and general secondary school. In 1971 it evolved to its current form as a middle school, and now educates 600 students aged 9-13 and employs more than 100 staff.
The Challenge
When planning to upgrade its fleet of copiers to Ricoh multi-function printers, Minehead Middle School found that its existing print management solution could not integrate with the new MFDs.
Committed to reducing print and copying costs, Minehead Middle School needed a print management solution that:
- Integrated with the new fleet
- Supported top-up cards or other administration-free credit management
- Offered easy enforcement of limitations on print size, types and volumes.
The Solution
Minehead Middle School sought recommendations from other schools as part of its research into suitable print management solutions. PaperCut’s reputation, combined with the ease of use and flexibility experienced while using the fully functional trial software, convinced IT Manager Tony Ayre that it was the right product for the school.
Minehead Middle School completed a full roll out of PaperCut over the summer vacation. It easily replicated its existing print policies, which include rules such as:
- Restricting student printing to 5 pages per job: a maximum file length of five pages or five copies of a single page
- Ensuring documents have titles, to give an indication of what’s being printed (requests to print documents with titles such as Document1 are denied).
Students and staff are provided with quotas for the number of prints per week (for students) or month (for staff) and the types of printing (students cannot print in color; staff can print a maximum of 20 color prints a month).
How PaperCut Helped
Since introducing PaperCut, student printing has reduced by a massive 90%, and overall printing across the school by one sixth.
Print volumes are much more tightly controlled, and staff and students understand their available quotas and the processes to follow if they have legitimate needs for additional printing.
IT staff appreciate the “set and forget” nature of day-to-day print management, trusting PaperCut to do the job. Embedded PaperCut software on the Ricoh MFDs is intuitive and easy to use. Staff and students interact with the PaperCut client software installed on their Windows computers. It provides easy access to quota information and enforces cost effective
Minehead Middle School is considering implementing further controls with PaperCut, such as prompts to question the need to print in color.
Minehead Middle School is actively involved in the PaperCut community, suggesting product enhancements for its own benefit and that of other PaperCut users.
PaperCut at a Glance
PaperCut is the easy way to automatically monitor and manage printing in your organization, giving you control over your costs and environmental impact. PaperCut is:
- Fully cross-platform, supporting all major operating systems, including mixed environments
- Scalable to networks of all sizes, from five to 500,000 end users
- Designed for security
- Available under a true enterprise-wide license with no limits on the number of servers, workstations, printers, operating systems or domains
- Ready for integration with your intranet to match your organization’s look and feel
- Modern software under active development using current development tools and methods
- Supported directly by the friendly, approachable development team
- Used by more than 30,000 organizations in 100+ countries.
