How to manage printers via a web browser

In quite a few big companies, there are dozens of multifunction devices and even more smaller printers, which, taken altogether, print hundreds of thousands of pages every month. Given such a huge volume, even a small percentage of unnecessary printing often results in substantial additional expenses for the company. Up to 20 percent of consumable materials may be spent on printouts for “personal” use.

The problem is clearly to reduce printing expenses. It can be done via continuous monitoring of printers, collection of statistical data, and optimization (using processed data). Let’s consider a software solution based on O&K Print Watch. Among other features, it has a built-in HTTP web server. The web server provides on-demand data, such as printer usage and printer access statistics. The whole system works as follows. A print job sent by the user appears at the web server. The following data is available:

• Printer name and computer name (source of the print job);
• User login (source of the print job);
• Document name and the number of pages;
• File size, printing date, printing format, and color mode.

If the print job is a graphical image, its size also appears in the summary table provided by O&K Print Watch’s web server. The document can be saved as an image or as a PDF document. The printing statistics also includes the average number of documents and the average number of pages printed per day. Moreover, O&K Print Watch can predict the volume of expenses for a specific time period; for that purpose, there is a position named “Cost”.

You can view printing statistics on a specific printer group literally from anywhere. Of course, you must have certain access privileges, the printers must be connected to a computer, and O&K Print Watch must be duly installed and configured. Then you can check at your convenience via the Internet what and when has been printed in the office. You don’t even need to have a computer at hand, as you can view the data provided by O&K Print Watch’s web server on your tablet computer or smart phone.

Live demo O&K Print Watch Web-server

Remote administration often lets you solve a problem while sitting at your desk, which doesn’t even need to be located in the office. Having the web server administrator privileges, you can sign in and edit O&K Print Watch’s databases. For example, you can delete records or printers from the database, delete obsolete images, and so on.

If some users require full access only to view statistics, using read-only mode is preferable. Supervisors and company management usually view summary reports but don’t edit anything, so read-only access should be configured for them. You can allocate such access privileges for a specific user group.

O&K Print Watch lets you optimize printing and easily monitor its databases on print requests sent to printers or multifunction devices. For example, you can use O&K Print Watch to reduce the expenses resulting from some employees’ habit to print any and all documents just for one-time reading. Of course, you may have to persuade such employees to switch from using “free” printer toner and paper to reading documents on e-readers or other modern gadgets.