How a Print Server can Prepare Your Business for the Future

It seems odd, but people are declaring 3D printers to be the technology that's going to revolutionize the future while simultaneously moving away from paper printers. Let talk about the printers you use for your business. A print server solution will help you transition away from your current printer setup so that you can take advantage of cool futuristic technologies!

One way that a print server can help prepare your company for the future is by consolidating the printers that you're currently using. This will free up space in your office that you can use for something way cooler than an old inkjet printer (like a sweet 3D printer perhaps?).

A print server is able to do this by handling all of your network's print traffic and sending print requests to a smaller number of more efficient and more powerful printers. This is opposed to having old printers haphazardly located throughout the office, or worse, having one cheap printer for every workstation.

The implementation of a new print server solution will give you the opportunity to rethink your entire printing setup. Many organizations that have implemented a print server have consolidated the number of printers used by as much as 3:1! Unless you did a good job planning the setup of your company's network, it's likely that you kept adding random printers to your IT infrastructure as your business grew. This is how most businesses grow, adding new technology as the need arises. Growing this way will get you by, but it's much better when growth is planned for and a framework to handle growth is in place.

One of the ways that a print server relieves a company's growing pains is by directing printer traffic away from the main server units. A lot of data is transferred when a document is printed. If your network isn't designed to handle a large amount of print traffic, then having multiple users trying to simultaneously print documents will slow down your entire network.

Print traffic slowing down your network can hinder office communications and the performance of your hosted applications, which is an expensive problem we call downtime. By diverting all of your print traffic to a dedicated print server, you will free up bandwidth on your network so that you can use your network's resources for more essential tasks.

Additionally, a print server will give you control of all the printing going on in your office. Without any oversight for your company's printing habits, it's easy for your employee's to use more paper and ink than what they need to. If you're the one buying refills on printer ink, then you know firsthand that it's one of the priciest commodities per ounce in the office. In fact, it's estimated that a gallon of black printer ink retails for a minimum of $2,000!

With a print server, the network administrator can set printing limitations on a per-user basis. This can include limits on how many pages of paper a user can print in a workday, and you can even make it so that only the staff that needs to print color documents will have the ability to. This will really help cut back on losing money if you have employees that aren't careful about printing. It can also take away the suspicion that certain employees are abusing their printer privileges for their personal needs, like garage sale flyers and scrapbooking.

With the money saved from printing expenses, using a print server will free up capital and desk space so that you can take advantage of more futuristic technology solutions that will add to your budget instead of draining it. A print server makes operations easier and is a prime example of what it looks like when technology works for you. This is exactly what Preferred is all about. Give us a call at 708-781-7110 to find out more about how a print server and other business technologies can improve your operations!