Managing hundreds of wireless or network printers at a location can be a print management nightmare. System administrators have tried many different ways to lower printing costs (printers, paper, toner, ink) in an effort to save money. Some methods may seem futile, but there are ways to save money and manage your printers better that really WORK!

For instance, have you ever noticed how many printers in your organization sit idle all the time? Fully loaded with paper, and toner or ink? One way to reduce costs is to use network printers accessible to multiple employees. Now what if you have printers and don’t want to buy new ones? Print management software can help you save money by making your existing printers available through your network.

A good print server is something every organization with more than one employee needs. It can be anything from a simple network enabled printer to a software program installed on a PC that makes your desktop printer visible to users on your intranet (business network). This simple form of Print Management allows you to save money buy needing less printers, supplies (ink, toner, paper) per office location.

Another form of Print Management for large enterprises is the ability to view printer status information from a central location? Wonder if a printer is offline? Are printers low on ink or toner? Are there printers that have paper jams? Are certain printers used more than others? Those are things a true print management system will tell you but few deliver. Most vendors have proprietary tools that will tell you how your HP printers are doing, or how your Toshiba printers are doing. But ask them for a solution that works with multiple vendors? … didn’t think so.

Some have asked, What is Adobe Postscript? Postscript is a programming language. It is a printer language. It is a way of encapsulating text, images, in a document, and telling a printer how to display those objects. It is supported by most printers, HP, Toshiba, Ricoh (IBM, Lexmark).
Learn more about Adobe Postscript

What is a Print Server? A Print server is any device (software, or hardware) that manages the documents you, or those in your office print. What makes a Print Server different than a Desktop Printer? A Print Server is accessible to everyone in your office, work group, or team.

This doesn’t just mean that the Print Server (Printer) is in a location where everyone can get to. For a Print Server to be useful it needs to be on the Network; a network print server. When a Print Server is network capable, everyone in the office can use it and your organization benefits from saved costs. With a Printer Server you save costs by not having to buy a printer for every employee, or in the home computing scenario, everyone in your house. You save on reduced Ink costs, and reduced paper costs as you wont have as many printers laying around stocked with paper and ink. So to summarize a Network Print Server saves you money by:

• Reducing the number of printers in an organization (office, home)
• Reducing the overall cost of ink
• Reducing the overall cost of paper

Which Print Server is best for you? A Hardware Print Server? A Software Print Server? A Wireless Print Server? A USB Print Server? A Windows Print Server? A Linux Print Server? An iSeries (AS400) Print Server?

Each comes with its own pros and cons. We’ll discuss each in future articles.