Logging print jobs?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dave Navarro
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Dave Navarro

Over the last year, one of my clients has added two additional network
printers to the one they already had for their office.

They have two Ricoh 3800C laser printers and an HP 8550MFP laser printer
connected to their network.

Over the past 6 months, print output by employees has gone up from
roughly 40,000 pages a month to nearly 400,000 pages a month.

Because the printers are all plugged directly into the network (not
shared through a server), they are unable to log the activity to see who
is generating all this additional traffic.

Is the only way to log this traffic to force everyone to go through a
"print server" instead of directly connecting to the printers?

Thanks for any help anyone can provide.

--Dave
 
Dave Navarro said:
Over the last year, one of my clients has added two additional network
printers to the one they already had for their office.

They have two Ricoh 3800C laser printers and an HP 8550MFP laser printer
connected to their network.

Over the past 6 months, print output by employees has gone up from
roughly 40,000 pages a month to nearly 400,000 pages a month.

Because the printers are all plugged directly into the network (not
shared through a server), they are unable to log the activity to see who
is generating all this additional traffic.

Is the only way to log this traffic to force everyone to go through a
"print server" instead of directly connecting to the printers?

Thanks for any help anyone can provide.

--Dave
Click to expand...

No, but it's the easiest.

And frankly, any decent print tracking system will involve a server and
some software add-ons to the client workstations.

A Windows print server would be cheap, and would allow some
administrator functionality for the print queues.

Frankly, I think it's hilarious. Do you know how much they're paying
for those clicks and for that 360K jump in pages??? At a nickel per,
that's $18,000.

Per month.

That your client is suddenly spending.

I don't think he should worry about spending a few bucks to get complete
hold of his printing.

Step one should probably involve some REAL printers, that are cheaper to
run.
 
Another solution could be to listen for packets that goes to these printers.
Result could be number of packets from each computer.

Jan
 
Step one should probably involve some REAL printers, that are cheaper to
run.
Click to expand...

You've got me curious... What do you recommend for color later printers
that are cheaper than the Ricoh and HP?

--Dave
 
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