As part of its continuing improvements to staff printing at the University, IS&T is making the following changes:
Resetting your printing balance to zero from 1 August
The desktop icon which shows the cost of your printing will revert to £0.00 from 1 August. After that, the balance will continue to run (in minus figures) as you print so you will be able to see exactly what the cost is as you go along. Some types of printer are more expensive to print from than others and the way you lay out documents and the printing options you choose all affect the cost.
Why do we show the printing balance on your desktop?
The cost of your printing is charged to your department and this tool helps you keep an eye on how much you’re printing. We hope it will encourage staff to reflect on their printing habits and consider the most cost effective way of sharing or referring to documents. For more information about the printing balance, please read our blog article or see our FAQs.
Piloting an easy way to reduce printing costs and improve sustainability
We are piloting a piece of software called Adobe LeanPrint within the University. This helps to save paper and ink for the printing you do. It’s an easy piece of software to use and automatically optimises each document to make savings without compromising readability. Settings are adjustable so you can decide how strong you want the paper and ink savings to be and you can see reports of how much you’ve saved as you go along. It’s also simple to revert to conventional printing at the touch of a button so you can print as you’ve always done for a particular document.
Volunteer to be part of the pilot
If you would like to be part of this pilot, please send your name and your computer number to Simon Goldsmith (SLS) and the software will be installed on your machine. For more information please see our blog article.
Making the print costing process more accurate
To ensure accuracy in the way finance charges central departments and faculties for printing jobs, IS&T has created a checking mechanism on staff printers. This will help the costing process and make it easier to diagnose problems when jobs don’t print properly.
How will this affect me?
Most of the time, this won’t affect your printing and you won’t notice the change but, in some cases (where print jobs are queued and then released together) it may slightly increase the time it takes jobs to run off. This is because software will automatically check before and after each job that the print count is accurate. The print time for individual jobs won’t change and multiple copies of the same document won’t be affected but, if you regularly store up jobs and then release your printing together, you may want to allow a little extra time to collect it. The delay will only be about 1 second between each document.