Pull printing can alleviate burden in the education sector, advises Y Soft

Recent analysis by the House of Commons Library has shown that education spending as a share of GDP fell from 5.69 per cent to 4.27 per cent in seven years.

With educational institutions feeling the pinch, many are turning to cost-cutting solutions to save money without impacting the quality of education provided. Y Soft Corporation, the enterprise office solution provider, believes that one answer lies in pull printing.

The advantages of cloud computing are well-documented, with the technology bringing measurable benefits in terms of business efficiency. With pull printing, print jobs do not print until the user authenticates at the printer. And, there is no location-based restriction on printing, even for 3D objects, users can “pull” the print job to any printer in their schools’ network.

James Turner, Regional Sales Manager at Y Soft, commented: “There are a vast number of benefits for educators if they wish to adopt a pull printing solution. With larger institutions, universities for example, staff can send a document or 3D object from their campus and print it that same minute in another country without IT assistance or additional print drivers. Whether an educator has one central location to work from or regional offices around the globe, a pull printing solution can scale to support on-demand pull printing now or as demand grows.”

Extending the value of pull printing even further, client-based pull printing can reduce the cost of a school’s print infrastructure by utilising less expensive servers. It achieves this by handling complex print tasks on the user’s workstation and non-complex tasks, such as user authentication and usage audit reporting, on less expensive servers.

James continued: “The education sector can no longer wait around for the government to provide a solution, and therefore must take matters into its own hands, rather than wait for more favourable economic conditions to take hold. The education sector must incorporate the most appropriate, cost-effective technology to increase productivity. Whilst there are myriad ways in which technology can make a difference, pull printing is one solution that can have an effect on staff efficiency and productivity.

“When most of a university’s IT budget is allocated to just running the business, there is only a small amount left for transforming it. By implementing solutions that can reduce print servers, organisations can open up more budget to spend on transformation because there will be less spent on maintenance. An effective way for educational institutions to do this is by the implementation of pull printing.”