Document Management Solution: Canon's Printeaze

Paper and printing costs account for a significant part of every organization's budgets, and the

unfortunate part is that it's often ignored by a

lot of organizations. While large enterprises might be able to afford the losses caused by wastage of paper and

printing because they have deep pockets, things are not so rosy for SMEs, who have to struggle to keep their

bottomline healthy. One small contribution to their

bottomline can come by controlling the wastage of paper and printing in their organization. This is easier said than done, which is why SMEs tend to ignore it. This is where Printeaze can make life easy for SMEs, because it can

analyze all the printing and copying jobs in the

organization.

The solution is designed to help organizations control their printing cost. It does that by allowing you to define the cost of printing for various types and sizes of documents, and then setting the maximum cost limit per user or group, with automatic email alerts if they exceed a particular threshold. For instance, you can define that users in the accounts department are not allowed to take prints of more than Rs. 50 per user, with an automatic email alert at Rs. 45. Further still, you can do even more fine-grain control by breaking up that cost by color and size of printing. The solution will automatically send out an email alert to users whose printing cost exceeds this value, and would not be allowed to take any further prints.

Setup

The software requires a machine with Windows 2003 or 2008 Server, IIS 5.0 with ASP, .NET 3.5 SP1, and SQL Server 2000 or higher. Hardware requirements include 4 GB RAM and 40 GB of hard drive space at least. Once you have a machine ready with these components, setting up the Printeaze software itself is a piece of cake. It has an auto-discovery mode that would automatically find all the compatible printers connected to your network. The software supports and can account the print, scan, copy and fax from Canon's network ready series of printers and MFDs. Competition models are certified to work with the solution on a case to case basis.

Management Interface

Printeaze has a web-based interface for doing all the

configuration and management, which can be accessed from any machine on the network so long as it has

IE 6 and above. If you have Microsoft Active Directory based domain, then the software will automatically pick up all the users created on it for tracking their printing. Printeaze can integrate with department id and SSO-H feature of Canon IR to provide user wise activity report which can even attribute the scan and copy to the exact user. Faxes can of course be tracked, because they can be sent over the network.

The software has two kinds of roles-user and admin, both of which are pretty much self-explanatory. The user can view how much of his/her allocated printed cost has been consumed.

Reporting

The whole beauty of Printeaze lies in the wide variety of reports it can generate. You can track printing, copying, faxing and scanning being done on all the printers on your network. Since printing and faxing jobs can be fired by users over the network, the software can track them by user or group over a desired timeframe. It even shows the top ten users of printers on your network. The reports can becoming an eye-opener for an organization because it will reveal the actual cost of printing being performed in house, thereby helping control wastage. The software allows you to export the reports in either CSV or PDF formats.