O&K Print Watch — print control, print audit, and reduction of printing costs

Probably any modern company or organization has to tackle the problem of saving costs associated with using printing equipment. Employees typically waste hundreds of paper sheets and ounces of laser toner (including the expensive color toner) every month, and the employer has to buy a lot of printing consumables. The major cause of this issue is not the use of company printers or multi-function devices by some dishonest employees for their personal purposes, but a general lack of an effective monitoring solution to enable the company to substantially optimize the use of its printing equipment in order to save money.

O&K Print Watch is a state-of-the-art, all-in-one print audit tool that was developed by O&K Software to combat the problem. O&K Print Watch is a remote monitoring system that can track each document sent to printing, maintain detailed statistics of usage of printers and multi-function devices by company employees, and even set quotas on certain printing parameters. O&K Print Watch enables radical optimization of the use of printing equipment. As a result, you can cut the purchases of printing consumables by up to 30 percent and (which is not insignificant) teach your employees to be thrifty when spending valuable company resources.

You can find a number of alternative software solutions, but none of them is a match to O&K Print Watch, which is feature rich, supports all kinds of printers and multi-function devices, and is very easy to use. Let’s take a look at its key features.

Probably the most important advantage is that you can install O&K Print Watch on your company server, without bothering to install its copies on each workstation. The application’s user-friendly web interface allows the person in charge (such as a system administrator) to directly access all necessary information. Here you can see detailed statistics about each computer, printer, and user registered in your company network. You can also see detailed information about all files sent to printing, such as file size, page count, and estimated printing cost. Moreover, O&K Print Watch can automatically send reports to a specified e-mail address, which will save you a lot of time when you monitor the use of printing equipment in your company.

O&K Print Watch is an all-in-one print monitor, and it also lets you set quotas on certain printing parameters. For example, you can set limits on page count or toner usage for a specific computer or user. The limits can apply to a specific time period (daily or monthly limits), or to any document sent to printing. For example, you can allow certain users to print no more than 100 pages per day. When they reach their specific limits, the printing will automatically stop. Besides, you can restrict color printing or allow duplex (two-sided) printing only.

Such limitations on the amount and type of printing will teach your employees to use company printers and multi-function devices more thriftily, and not to print unnecessary documents. It should also be noted that the system of print quotas implemented in O&K Print Watch will save you a lot of money that you would otherwise have spent on color toner. Surely, most technical documents look fine when printed in black-and-white. O&K Print Watch can automatically redirect such documents to monochrome printers, so that you can buy fewer expensive color cartridges.

O&K Print Watch has a nice extra feature: automatic saving of all printed documents as image files or PDF files. As you can see, this software tool is extremely useful as it lets you audit not only the amount of printed pages but also their content. Having an archive of print copies, you can easily find out which employees have wasted their time and used company resources for their personal purposes. Please note that O&K Print Watch saves the copies of printed documents not on the users’ workstations but on the company server, so that only the person in charge can access the copies.

O&K Print Watch has yet another advantage: It supports extensive diagnostics of various printers and multi-function devices. Most alternative solutions support diagnostics of the products of certain vendors only. But O&K Print Watch is an all-in-one diagnostic tool, compatible with almost all models made by major vendors of printing equipment. It supports all modern printing protocols and provides a single interface for monitoring printer cartridges, input paper trays, and any errors during the printing equipment’s operation. If your printers and multi-function devices support the SNMP network protocol, this feature will be configured automatically.

In addition to the above advantages, O&K Print Watch has a low system footprint. It supports a number of operating systems (see System requirements), but only needs about 100 megabytes of disk space to install. (Note: Remember to allocate extra disk space for logs and print copies.) Thanks to the remote control feature, O&K Print Watch is a perfect print auditing tool that lets you monitor your company-wide network at any site or office.

To evaluate the features of this innovative print monitor, please download O&K Print Watch from its website. New users can use the free trial version for 30 days and get an insight into the rich features of this unique tool.