🚀 go-pugleaf

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Tony and all,

  Here at UCD we are almost to the point of charging for laser
printing.  The technical side is in place and we are counting printed
pages.  However, the financial system here would require us to send
monthly statements to all users about their printing costs which would
cost much more than we could reasonably recoup.  I have a short
description of our setup at http://lm.ucdavis.edu/people/tim/lab.html
you might find useful.

                        Tim Leamy
                        Information Resources
                        University of California at Davis
                        tcleamy@ucdavis.edu



> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> Forgive me if this has been discussed in the several months I have been off
> the list...
>
> Over the past several years, we have always tried to find an equitable,
> seamless way to recover some of the costs associated with providing laser
> printers in our public labs. We have about 600 public-access and we would
> like to reduce the volume of printing, if not get back all the costs
> associated with same. At the moment, all laser printing is free. To
> complicate the matter, we don't have users of the labs log in using a unique
> ID, they all just log in as a generic workstation ID. This means that in
> order to start accounting for costs, we would first have to come up with a
> way to have lab users log in as themselves. In a Novell environment like
> ours, with about 22,000 faculty and students, this could get to be a
> technical nightmare.
>
> My knee-jerk reaction is to continue to provide free printing, as I think
> the cost of doing this will be less than the cost of trying to engineer and
> implement another solution.
>
> How are others handling this situation? If you can send my your thoughts,
> plans and schemes via e-mail, I will summarize to the mailing list. Thanks
> in advance.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>  Tony Townsend, Microcomputer Infrastructure Manager, Info.Tech. & Comm.
>  530 McCormick Rd., University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22906
>  Tony@virginia.edu - 804-982-4713 - Fax 804-982-4715
>