Every weekday, thousands of students and faculty arrive at their local schools depending on a smooth experience—an experience that is largely dependent on the ability to print. From lesson plans, to worksheets, to homework assignments, teachers and students especially rely on the printing process. But a school district’s limited budget can rupture that process through sparse IT staff and inefficient printing hardware and software that struggle to meet the needs of users. When printing is disrupted, everyone is agitated.
Printing is one of many IT responsibilities in a school district, yet it can claim disproportionate amounts of time, which redirects IT staff from other important tasks. Print servers are a major part of the problem. Whether they are centralized in a data center or distributed throughout schools, they require additional management, create risk through a single point of failure, complicate deployment, consume IT resources, and drive up costs. School districts also face more printing problems:
- Lack of centralized management. Working with print servers in a distributed model gets complicated, and each additional server compounds the work. Without centralized management, IT has to remote in or travel to varying locations to deploy printer drivers or fix a downed server.
- Slow response time because of slim IT resources. A limited budget can mean that teachers and administrators may not get IT help as fast as they need it. Any printing problem increases help desk calls—whether the server is down, a teacher doesn’t have the correct printer driver, or the wide-area network (WAN) connection for printing is sluggish. With the amount of high-volume printing in a school district, problems are expected. Keeping up with them can be a challenge.
- Maintaining printer uptime. When a teacher can’t print because the print server is down… (click here to read more)