Many organizations wish to gain better control over their print environment because printing is a significant source of expenses, and one that is often difficult to manage. These costs come from a variety of printing practices, including the use of inkjets (which are relatively cheap to buy, but relatively expensive to run), inappropriate use of color (e.g., for draft documents, emails, personal files, etc.), and inappropriate use of devices (e.g., large runs sent to small workgroup printers rather than high volume reprographics centers).
A number of products in the market allow organizations to track the type of printing that occurs (such as Lexmark Markvision™, HP WebJetAdmin, Xerox® CenterWare™ Web and Pharos Blueprint®). Using this information, organizations can begin to phase out devices with a poor fit with respect to system usage requirements. However, changing user behavior is difficult when users are able to directly access printers on the network. Some existing approaches (e.g., Pharos® Uniprint®, EnvisionWare® LP:TOne, Equitrac® XYZ) can prevent users from accessing printers directly, and instead force them to print via these products' print servers—enabling the system administrator to set appropriate print policies.
All of these products have a potential disadvantage, namely that they require changes to the organization print environment, such as through installing components on the workstation, changing the print destination, installing software on the print server, and/or changing the print server queue configuration. Such products may also require the customer to make changes to the printer itself to remove the capability of users to print directly thereto.