Features

Printing, Paper, and Posters, Oh My!

By Collin Loppnow (cloppnow@css.edu)

November 22, 2024

     Over summer, CSS began a 3-year project, named Project Printwise, to overhaul printing on campus. It began with the closure of the Copy Center, and has continued with the installation of new printers in several locations across the college. Some CSS community members have been confused by the changes, and expressed concern. When asked about the biggest concerns for students, Student Body President Madelyn (Maddy) Ploof said, “It’s mostly clubs,” continuing, “Our main thing is posters.” The posters placed around campus are typically budgeted out of club and department printing budgets, but with the changes, many club leaders and student workers have been uncertain of how to appropriately handle it. Ploof went on to explain why they are so important, saying “There’s so many things on SaintsLife, it gets a bit overpopulated … It’s so crucial that freshmen are attending things to build those communities.” That community growth is particularly important for CSS, as it is a core Benedictine value.

     In speaking about the reason for the changes, it was clear John Schottenbauer, the Director of IT Technical Services at CSS, has had another of the Benedictine values on his mind—stewardship. “The Chief Financial officer at the time came and asked me ‘What’s our total spend on printing?’ I couldn’t provide that, because we had such a disparate amount of monitoring on our printers,” he said. He explained,”I’ve been in the director position for a little over three years now, and what I inherited was a wide variety of printers that were spread across our campus. Some of the printers were incredibly old, because they’d just kind of been forgotten about. When I started [this project], we had about 250 printers spread across our campuses.” For comparison, Schottenbauer noted that institutions similar to CSS in size, function, and scope, typically have between 40-60 printers, leaving CSS with a surplus printing capacity of roughly 200 printers. He added, “At least at this point in time … we’re not gonna go that low. But it will be less than 100.” Schottenbauer continued, “We’re not the only ones who are going through the same process right now. Rethinking a process or a service that has been offered for the last 30 or 40 years and realizing that maybe it got out of hand, and they’re not doing it very well anymore.” 

     He also expressed concern over waste, saying, “Very commonly, what we’ll see in our common printing areas—especially in the student labs—is a lot of abandoned print jobs, which is just paper waste. Which, at the end of the day, still costs the College, and not to mention the environment.”

     Speaking specifically about the closure of the Copy Center, Schottenbauer explained, “This past Spring, when we were facing some budget considerations, one of the things that they were looking at was the Copy Center and the services it provided—which wasn’t just the services on the second floor up at the Loading Dock, but was also all of the copier machines that were spread around the campus—roughly 20 of them… We were spending well over $100,000 a year for that service that encompassed all those bits and pieces, and when you broke down the cost-per-page, we were spending; well, during the pandemic, obviously, we were spending that money and not having much return on it at all. But even afterwards, we were spending about 50 cents per printed page when you took into consideration those services and the total cost of the contract.”

     While that sense of stewardship gave the project its initial momentum, consideration has been given for the needs of the community. “A lot of people will make the argument ‘I need to have a printer in my office because I print a lot of secure documents and confidential material.’ Well, we’ve addressed that by requiring you to log in at the device to release your print jobs. … Obviously, there will be arguments in special cases, especially in terms of accessibility. If someone has any physical limitations, then obviously we’d be considering installing a printer in that office with a direct USB connector or something like that. So we’re not ruling it out as an option,” Schottenbauer said. He added, “As a result of having a login to release your print jobs, that also reduces paper waste.”

     Schottenbauer explained how the new printers can be used, saying, “Instead of replacing the copiers with new copiers under a different service, we decided to go the route of Multi-Function Printers (MFPs), which provide the copy/Print/Scan functions… It’s tied to our identity management, so people will sign in with their username (not their email address!) and their password, and they can access the machine. If they’ve sent print jobs, they can release those print jobs there. If they want to make copies, they would access the device to make copies. Or if they want to scan, that is also an option right there on the screen,” he continued. 

     Schottenbauer was aware of the confusion in the community, saying, “It’s probably not been a very well-communicated process.” He added, “We got off to a rocky start, because our timeline was much shorter than we would really have preferred it to be. So the rollout didn’t go great. New devices showed up after the start of the semester. Configurations had to happen after the devices showed up on campus, so not everything was configured right, and there was a lot of gnashing of teeth and frustration by our community—and totally understandable. I don’t fault them at all for their frustration.” He was confident, however, that the project was doing well, saying, “They’re all things that can be fixed, so we need to fix things as they come up, but we’re leveling into a pretty decent spot with this initial rollout.” 

     Schottenbauer went on to clarify for student-workers and clubs, “Students can print to these new printers for their departments, or even any of the printers for their departments. In most cases, a lot of the older departmental printers there will be running at no [paper allowance] cost. But if they’re printing to one of these new MFPs, they’ll have to request a refund by logging into PaperCut to request refunds on their job.” 

     John quickly pulled up the CSS IT Client Portal, found under Help & Resources on my.css.edu, and searched for “Print.” Upon opening the “Printing on Campus” article, he explained “It talks about printing, and also includes a link to log in to the printing portal where they can ask for a refund on jobs. Faculty & Staff printing is listed there as well, with all the details.”

     Looking forward to future phases of the project, Schottenbauer said, “It’s not a small project. It’s a really large undertaking,” and continued, “There’s still a lot of work to be done. And our team is working to do that. Along with the work that needs to be done as a College to determine how we’re handling things. Right now, paper is a hodgepodge—it’s ordered by one department, and it’s managed by the mailroom, and they bill out according to whoever they deliver it to. We’re in preliminary discussions—we’re not really meeting resistance, we just need to finalize it- where paper will now be handled by IT, both in funding and distribution. Printer support and toner support will ultimately be through IT and the Service Desk.” 

     In addition to administrative changes, Schottenbauer described plans for new equipment, saying “Our Phase 2, or Year 2, starting this coming summer, will be addressing all of our common areas student printing locations. We’ll be updating them with brand-new higher-volume printers very much like the ones we’ve installed in some of the common locations already, when we were replacing the copiers. They will be secure release, which means they’ll have to log in to release [the print job]. Right now, if students print Color, they have to contact the Service Desk to release their print job. That won’t be a problem anymore. They’ll be able to release the job themselves.” He added, “We do have a poster printer—we haven’t deployed it yet because we’re working with Student Government to try to come up with the best plan to make that accessible to students, to be able to print and release jobs.”

     While the project is large and complex, the end result should be a streamlined and consistent experience for all community members, improvements in security and waste reduction, and full organizational accountability for printing at CSS. Thinking back to the request he received, Schottenbauer said “I can run an executive summary out of PaperCut [software] that will give us a total picture of all of our printers that exist in that system, so the end goal is to get all of our printers in that system all functioning the same way and providing a report, so that at the end of the day, when somebody walks into my office and asks for that report, I can provide it.”