Eliminate all print servers, reduce waste and improve user print habits to get unprecedented environmental savings.

Cirrato can help you reduce energy and paper usage - as well as reduce support trips - even the number of colour printouts. Each measure is meaningful on its own, but when combined, the environmental effect can be staggering and the savings go directly to the bottom line.

Reduce wasteful behavior and promote environmental awareness using a flexible set of rules, incorporating informative messages, enforced actions and/or changes to default printer settings.

How do you increase employee awareness of the environmental effects and costs of printing? With Cirrato Printing Rules, you can effectively educate employees or enforce best practices across the entire organization, including remote offices and directly connected USB printers.

Matching Criteria

Cirrato will first match the job based on criteria that you have defined. It will then send a message to end users and/or enforce an action

• User (based on Active Directory username or group)
• Printer (per-printer or custom printer group)
• Application (based on document name)
• Paper size (A3, A4, etc)
• Colour / Monochrome
• Duplex / Simplex
• Number of pages
• Cost of printout (as defined in Cirrato priceplans)

Automatic Messaging Options

You can set up custom messages that a user receives for each rule you set up. The messages can be in various formats:

• Balloon tip
• Pop-up dialogue
• Take user to web page (for example intranet site for company printing policy)

Rule Actions

And finally, for each rule, you can set up a variety of automatic actions to be performed:

• Allow (do nothing to the job)
• Move (to another printer)
• Delete
• Pause (administrator can then review and either allow, move or delete job)

Example Printing Rules

Cirrato's printing rules allows for wide flexibility. Below are some examples of commonly used rules:

• Route large or colour documents to more cost-effective printers, and send a message to the user when it has been done
• Route large jobs to print rooms automatically (Cirrato fully integrated with certain print room software)
• Manage printing rights for different types of users
• Default print jobs from internet explorer to black and white and duplex.
• Set up educational messages for users who are about to print a very expensive job
• Force-delete jobs that don't conform to the company's printing policy

Changing default printer settings

While printing rules is a highly efficient way of achieving large cost and waste reductions, some organizations prefer giving their users more choice. Read more about how easily managing printer default settings can help you achieve this.

Stuck jobs lead to double-printing and irritated users. Cirrato Time To Live automatically clears print queues and eliminates many support calls.

Sometimes even the best printer experiences a paper jam or runs out of paper causing stuck jobs. One such job in a queue prevents others from being printed. Users then print to another printer, but the original job stays, leading to wasted printouts when the problem job is cleared from the queue. The result is piles of uncollected paper next to printers and calls to IT support.

With Cirrato Time To Live, unprinted jobs will be handled in one or more of the following ways:

• The job can be moved to another queue
• The responsible user can be notified
• A support representative can be alerted and solve the problem

With Cirrato Time To Live considerable waste is eliminated.

Use Cirrato to gather information about your true printing costs and to establish long-term cost reduction.

Intelligence is the basis for good decision-making. Don't risk implementing a full-on, all-at-once printer fleet optimization project without first gathering enough reliable data.

Cirrato's accurate and flexible reporting infrastructure provides precise information about what has been printed and how much it costs. The central Cirrato server has information on all printing in the organization - including locally connected USB printers in remote offices - and is able to gather accurate statistics.

Cirrato enables public printing operations - such as at Universities, Libraries and Internet Cafés - to easily allocate and comprehensively manage printing quota.

Easily manage printing allocations for students and teachers in universities (or customers in public printing environments such as Internet cafes, libraries and more). End-user quota accounts can be connected to Active Directory for use without authentication at the printer, or assigned to swipe/proximity cards or PIN codes. Price plans can easily be tiered by user group or category.

Features:

• One system can facilitate multiple price plans for different user groups (e.g. students and teachers)
• Automatic quota refills when certain criteria are met (e.g., a new course starts)
• Variable costs for different types of jobs (defined by printer, paper size, colour/mono, duplex/simplex, etc.)
• Authentication by Active Directory username, swipe/proximity cards or PIN codes
• Membership based price plans that are tiered by user group

Improve security, reduce waste and remove USB printers by allowing users to authenticate and collect their printouts at any printer.

Unless the user immediately fetches the printer output, printing is a potential source of information leakage. Furthermore, if there is a glitch, the print job may get stuck in the queue and print at a later stage, fully visible to the world.

With Follow Print, documents are released only after your authentication at the printer. You can collect jobs at your leisure at any enabled printer.

Improving availability further, Cirrato's Follow Print Redundancy mode lets you print directly if the server cannot be reached.

Improve Security

Authentication essentially eliminates the risk of documents sitting in the output tray and falling into the wrong hands.

Reduce Waste

People often forget to pick up print jobs, leaving a pile of uncollected paper next to the printer. With Cirrato Follow Print, customers report a total paper consumption reduction of up to 40%.

Remove Local Printers

The solution of choice to handle sensitive material in an organization is often to directly attach expensive desktop printers. With Follow Print, USB printers can be removed, privacy maintained and output quality enhanced, particularly with shared, multi-function printers.

Features

• Interact with Cirrato through the printer touch screen
• Print/copy/scan/fax can be locked until users authenticate
• Authenticate via PIN or card
• Assign PIN or new/temporary card through self-service web portal
• Implement accounting for print/copy/scan and user quotas
• Print even when the Cirrato server cannot be reached

Supported Printers

Embedded Follow Print is supported on Canon, HP, Konica Minolta, Kyocera, Ricoh, Sharp, Toshiba and Xerox MFDs equipped with a touch-screen.

For other brands, or printers lacking a touch-screen, external authentication boxes are available (read more).