O&K Print Watch – Print monitor and printing control software.

Now those of you that know what I've been doing for the past decade or so, know that I love collecting statistics for improving the daily performance. Here’s what I’ve got for the printers.

Regarding our work printers, there's a constant need to push my users into printing less, without pushing everything mindlessly into ePrints. And I've found the tool to do it prober.

O&K Print watch is the name

I've been battling our corporate firewall for years, not getting the permissions to open the ports for the supplies collection services, and there's simply no way they'll get open. Having my users for some reason refuse to report when the multifunction machines are low before the supplies run out, have had me store supplies that grow old, unused or simply get lost.

For a while now I've been running O&K Print Watch on the frontdesk guest computer as it is never turned off.

And made it send me mails on printers that run with less than 20% supplies. And now I now longer have an extra storage, yet the printers are not run dry.

Every morning I get this mail from the frontdesk computer if any of the printers are at 20% or lower, I pick up the phone and order the supplies needed, which is pretty easy when you get all the information like serial and productnumber. Even if the supplier have a hard time getting it home.

And that's my main reason for using O&K Print Watch. And why I’d recommend it for any siteadmin.

The fact it's so simple to install and use, takes all printers (the computer knows of), and it leaves practically no footprint is more than enough to endorse this. From here it’s something I’m going to have to push onto the portfolio guys at HQ.

My next step with it would be the actual statistics of printing.

I've been curious about many of the statistical features, like tracking who prints how much, who's printing black/white compared to full color, Duplex, OfficeJets rather than LaserJets. It seems I may be able to reduce the officewide printing by actually pinpointing the users not following your print policies.

The options of dividing my users into groups and segment them into profiles leaves plenty room for managers, marketing and finance alike to be better informed of their impact on our carbonfootprint.

Buttomline, if you want to know what's going on with your printers and don't have the time and energy to set up large SNMP collection networks, O&K Print watch will do it for you. You only need 5-10 minuttes setting it up. There’s no substitute really, trust me, I’ve looked for quite a while.