Come flu season, cold season, “the crud” or any epidemic, the workplace can be much like schools, churches, restaurants and, well, any place where people gather — it’s an area where disease is transmitted.
It is in those places where the infected and uninfected breathe the same air and touch the same surfaces, surfaces such as handles, doorknobs, faucets and so on.
In the workplace, once such common surface is the office copier or printer with its control panel, buttons, knobs and handles and so many people touching them.
While it’s easy to use disinfectant wipes and sprays on door handles, table tops and such, the office copier is no door handle. It takes special treatment.
Picture of copier in workplace man at desk
If you are thinking about disinfecting your copier or printer, here are five tips for effectively and safely sanitizing it without damaging it.
Gather your cleaning supplies.
Grab a lint-free cloth, some rubbing alcohol, a can of compressed air and whatever other cleaning supplies you want to use. Make sure your cleaning products are free of ammonia or chlorine.
Power down the copier or printer.
Before doing any cleaning, be sure to turn the device off and keep it turned off during cleaning. This prevents electrical accidents damaging to you and to the machine.
Use alcohol or an ammonia and bleach-free cleaner.
We recommend using alcohol as the best method to clean your device as it effectively and instantly kills contagions upon application and does so without damaging your device’s surfaces. If you do decide to use a disinfectant, make sure it is free of ammonia and bleach as both substances are damaging to your device. For example, while it may seem to make sense to use Windex to clean the copier glass, the ammonia in Windex will destroy the special coating on the glass, causing problems and possible glass replacement in the future.
Another thing to consider is that many disinfectants require surfaces to be wet with the cleaner anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes, depending on whatever pathogen you are trying to kill. Alcohol, though, kills and cleans on contact without the risk of damage to your equipment. That’s why we recommend using alcohol.
Wipe, don’t spray to sanitize your copier or printers surfaces.
When applying the cleaner, we suggest you lightly apply it to a lint-free cloth and then wipe the surfaces rather than spraying the surfaces and then wiping. Why? Two reasons. One, wiping provides much better and even surface coverage and, two, water-based cleaners are electrically conductive and thence dangerous to electronics. Any fluid reaching electronic surfaces could cause electrical shorts, causing damage to your device. Wiping prevents this kind damage as no free-floating droplets of solution will contact electronic surfaces. But back to the alcohol point, that’s why we recommend using alcohol as it is nonconductive and is more effective than other cleaners.
Dust the copier or printer device surfaces.
Sometimes as you are cleaning your copier or printer, dust, particles or other debris can become dislodged and find new surfaces to which adhere. This is where that can of compressed air comes into play. Simply give those surfaces a blast of air and any free dust and debris will disappear.
Hopefully, these tips help you in safely sanitizing your copier and keeping your workplace healthy.
But just as an additional tip, the best ways of preventing the spread of disease in the office is to … yep, you guessed it … wash your hands.
Here are some guidelines from the CDC on how to properly do that.
From time to time, your system will request for you to change your consumables and this includes you toner and as well as your waste toner bottles.
Here is how to change the waste toner bottle on a Sharp MX series copier — specifically the 4110, 4111, 4140, 4141, 5111, 5140 and 5141.
Your system will prompt you whenever your waste toner bottle is close to being full.
See an alert? Don’t worry. Just call.
When you receive that notification, call your office technology supplier to let them know you will need a new waste toner bottle replacement. Once you do this, you should receive your new bottle in a few days. For RK Black clients, the waste toner bottle will arrive in one to two business days.
Just so you know, the Sharp system will continue operating and printing as normal until the system is completely full at which point it will pause printing, giving you a prompt, asking you to swap out the old bottle for a new one.
If you’ve got a print job in the queue when this happens, don’t worry. As long as you don’t turn your Sharp copier off, you will not lose the jobs in the queue. Your Sharp copier will maintain the queue so once the waste toner bottle replaced, the printing will begin where it left off.
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Replace the old toner bottle with the new
Once that bottle arrives, you are then ready to exchange the full waste toner bottle with new empty bottle.
When you are ready to make the swap, simply open Sharp copier’s front cover. The waste toner bottle is the black box located underneath the toner cartridges.
To remove the waste toner bottle, press the lime green button. This will cause the top of the bottle to pop away from the machine to you can remove it. From there, just lift the bottle out of the system but taking care to not shake or jostle the bottle as there are open toner ports across the top. Pro tip: Sharp has designed the bottle so you can unstick the flaps near the ports cover the ports to minimize the mess. Another best practice though is to take the bottle and to place and seal it in a trash bag.
That way if something happens and the bottle gets shaken or dropped, you won’t have toner go everywhere — or what we call a “toner party.” They are no fun.
Now that you have the old bottle out and safely secured, the next step is to add the new empty waste toner bottle to the system. There’s nothing extra you need to do to prepare it for the system. Just remove it from the box, make sure the toner ports are at the top, locate the box sockets (hinge points for the toner bottle) in the system, match the bottom of the bottle to those sockets and place it in at an angle. Then just press the top in until it clicks, showing it has locked in position. Then just replace the front cover.
Then, just close the door.
That’s it!
Congrats!
You’ve replaced the waste toner bottle on your Sharp copier and you are ready to go!
Pirates these days don’t use words like “ahoy,” avast” and “matey.” They may not clunk around the decks of wooden tall ships on peg legs, wear eye patches, recite the pirate code or host colorful, talking, feathered creatures on their shoulders. But they are just as real today as they were centuries ago.
They’re just different.
One particular brand of pirate, rather than working dock lines of an old frigate works the lines of phones. While this kind does not seek gold, silver and jewels in chests, these pirates do seek to gain wealth, but at your and your organization’s expense.
These pirates gain their riches through phone-based toner scams.
How toner-based scams work
Here’s how these toner pirates work, they typically use the three ARRRrrrrs with variables thrown in, of course.
Step 1: Recon (Reconnaissance)
Before calling target organizations, they do a bit of scouting, doing some online research of organization, collecting names of key staff members and getting contact information. They may even call the target businesses, just to gather intel on your technology, the copier or printer manufacture and on who are their service providers.
Step 2: Razzle-dazzle (Deception)
Then armed with the information, they call your business claiming to be from your copier manufacturer (Ricoh, Canon, Sharp, Kyocera, or the like) or from your local office supply or technology company and may even drop a few of the names of your fellow staff or a superior.
Step 3: Raid (Execution)
If they didn’t do their reconnaissance before the call, they may ask about your equipment or toner, but typically they then tell you about some impending toner price increase, encouraging you to buy their toner now while it’s still cheap. The toner though is of inferior quality and of an exorbitantly high price.
They may even drop a name of a superior staff member, saying something like “I spoke with John Benbow and he said to call you to get the order put through” or such.
So how do they plunder your organization? Well, if you fall for the scam, you’ll get cheap toner that at best won’t produce quality documents, but at worst, you can’t use at all — and you will have paid an arm and leg for it, in a manner of speaking.
A word to the wise
If you are a client of ours, RK Black will never call you to sell you toner as most of our service contracts include toner as part of the “cost per click” charge. Under that contract, our technicians will deliver and install the toner as it is needed, making it completely unnecessary to call you.
So if someone calls claiming to be RK Black or to service RK Black equipment trying to sell you toner, you should see a red flag — or in this case the “Jolly Roger” (the black-skull-and-crossbones flag associated with piracy). The caller is not us and is a pirate.
Don’t fall victim to toner pirates
Help protect yourself and your organization from toner scammers by taking the following three actions:
Educate your office about these scams so that your co-workers will recognize them when they see them.
If you get such a toner scam call, ask the caller for a phone number by which to call them back. This typically results in rudeness or the quick click of the phone other end being hung up (also rude).
If you receive toner to your office and you aren’t familiar with it or the company sending it, don’t pay for it. Instead, call the company and tell them to pick it up. Don’t be afraid to reach out to the Better Business Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission for further help.
Thank you for your time and for your help in preventing toner fraud.
It’s time to talk about your printing environment. Whether you are a grade school or a university, you know the challenges of maintaining your printers, keeping them supplied, preventing waste and doing all of this within a budget.
It means keeping inventory, maintaining all of your printers and copiers, checking your supplies (paper, toner, ink cartridges) for each of device, cycling your stock so you don’t go past expirations and keeping track of expenses and dealing with surprise expenses as equipment goes down. It can be a real juggling act, right?
The good news is, it doesn’t have to be.
You can team up with your local managed print services provider and let them handle all of that for you, allowing you to get back to maintaining other aspects of your network and technology while saving you time and money. They’ll not only handle the juggling, they’ll turn your print environment into a smoothly and efficiently operating machine. How? By bringing in better technology if necessary, streamlining processes and reducing overall print environment-related costs.
Sure, you could go with the break-fix route with your local copier company, but you’ll still end up with unexpected costs with ebbing and flowing of consumable costs and repairs, making costs unpredictable.
That’s why managed print is the way to go. Here are seven benefits of going with a managed print solution for your institution of learning.
Updated technology
If your school’s printing environment is like what’s found in most schools, you have an armada of printers — some inkjet, some laser, some multifunction and some single, all of differing brands — and they are scattered throughout your buildings and campus, some in the classrooms, libraries, offices, lounges, hallways and no doubt, in the computer labs.
If your managed services provider is like RK Black, they will take inventory of all of this, conduct a study of how and where they are used and come back with a plan to consolidate your fleet, place devices where they will be used most efficiently and conveniently, standardize your technology, providing copier or printer upgrades and placing them where they would be most efficiently used.
No upfront investment
You don’t need to come up with all the funds to pay before you started. If you do need new equipment for upgrades, that initial cost for those devices will be rolled into your scheduled payments, making your costs bearable and consistent.
No unexpected costs in device repair or labor
Those regularly scheduled payments mentioned above? Yes, they take care of repair costs as well. Again, you don’t need to sweat it because your provider will take all of that on for you as part of your regular payment.
No or little device down time
Your provider will monitor your devices and will take whatever action necessary to keep your printing environment running, working to prevent problems before they happen. If something does happen, they’ll know about it and will fix it right away. Some providers, like RK Black, have a loaner program in case your devices do experience a catastrophic failure, and need to spend time in the “break room.”
Reduced cost per printed page
As it’s in your provider’s best interest to keep costs low, so your costs will be low too.
No toner costs
As with costs associated with printer upgrades, copier repairs, labor and such, your toner cost will be rolled into your regular payment, making your cost predictable.
More productivity
As under managed print services you won’t have hardly any downtime, if it all, and your devices will be catered toward you needs, both in abilities and placement, you can expect to see fewer lines and more productivity out of your fellow staff and happier students.
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It’s for these reasons many schools and universities alike are opting for managed print services for their print environments.
To sum it up going MPS leaves your school staff and your IT staff with one less thing to manage, while keeping your administrative staff, teachers and students happy and doing what they are at your institution to do.
If you are interested in bringing MPS to your school or learning more about it, Contact us!
Too many organizations, especially smaller cash-strapped ones, understandably shy of contracts and spending hard-to-get funds, think they are saving money by purchasing cheap desktop printers at big-box stores. What they don’t realize is they will end up spending several times what they paid for the printer in toner costs every single year they own the device — not to mention paper, repairs and unexpected downtimes (we say “unexpected” but you can expect they’ll happen at the worst times possible as Murphy’s law dictates).
Even going the contract route with a copier dealer, organizations face unexpected repair bills and the ebbing and flowing of consumable costs, making printing costs unpredictable — the printer raiding the coffers one month and only sipping from them the next.
With managed print services, most if not all of those issues are resolved.
Here are six benefits of moving from leasing or buying a printer or copier to a managed services contract:
Eliminate upfront investment — The initial cost of your device(s) are rolled into your scheduled payments.
Remove unexpected repair costs in parts and labor — Your regularly scheduled payment takes care of these too.
Eradicate or reduce printer/copier down time — Your service providers will monitor and take whatever necessary action to prevent issues before they happen. If something does happen, they’ll fix it right away. R.K. Black even has a loaner program in case the device really goes belly-up.
Diminish total cost per printed page — As it’s in your service provider’s best interest to keep costs low, your costs will see savings too.
Eliminate toner costs — These are included in your regularly scheduled payment, no longer on a separate bill.
Keep equipment up-to-date — You need not worry about replacing your equipment. As it’s in your service provider’s best interest to keep your costs down, your provider will know when it’s time to swap out the equipment for newer, more efficient technology.
It’s for these reasons many organizations opt for managed print services.
In short, going the MPS route leaves one less thing for organizations to have to manage, allowing them to focus their management skills on their organization and their core goals.
If you are interesting in bringing MPS to your organization, contact us!
Print management software is a software-based method for organizations to be able to centralize management of their printing fleets — the purpose being to bring better monitoring, efficiency, cost reduction, maintenance, usability and security to their printing environment.
That’s a long sentence for a short phrase, so here is another way of explaining it.
Print management software: An example … and a true story
Let’s say you are in charge of all the printers and copiers at a private university, and in your fleet you’ve got, say 333 devices of a variety of makes and models — some ink jet printers, some black and white toner-based copiers and yet other, color-capable devices.
It could be a real nightmare keeping all of those printers maintained, supplying their ink, toner and paper, tracking their usages and budgeting for their required expenditures. Wouldn’t it by nice if there was a way have a better handle on that with the simple click of a mouse?
This is where print management software comes into play. This software, coupled with the implementation of a managed print services plan (which would consolidate and optimize your print fleet), could drastically reduce your fleet, costs, maintenance and general aggravation.
Why do we say it can? You know that private university we spoke of earlier — the one that had 333 printers? That was Southern Nazarene University. By the time we finished implementing a managed print services plan and employing a print management software at the university, there were only 118 printers left campus-wide — and the fleet reduction was only the start.
With the print management software in place, students and staff were now only able to print with a badge-based printing technology, allowing them to print from their laptops or computers to any printer on campus available to them. Under this technology, the job would only print with a swipe of a badge at the desired printing device, saving the school money in toner and paper costs and maintenance.
Just as an example, after one month of using the software, the university noticed 17 reams of print jobs that never got released, resulting in what amounted to be $800 in cost savings in paper alone — not to mention toner and regular maintenance.
Not only was Southern Nazarene University able to reduce expenses, they were able to track and budget for them too — something they could not do prior to using the print management software.
But wait! That’s not all!
A print management software can do so much more. Let’s break it down a little further in discussing some of print management software PaperCut’s abilities.
Print monitoring
So we mentioned above how the university was able to see how 17 reams of paper one month were never released to print. It was the software that allowed them to realize that. This same print management software can track not only what is not being printed, but also what is being printed, where, who is printing it, how much and when. With this information, you can study patterns, make adjustments in your fleet for efficiency and cost reduction and even implement user accountability measures. For example, if an associate has a tendency to print every document in color, you can encourage B&W printing through pop-up requests or print rules created in your print management software.
Badge-based cloud printing
This is the technology the students and staff were using at the university. Not only can you use this badge-based printing capability to print from anywhere, adding convenience, and to save jobs from being printed and never picked up, reducing costs, you can set permissions per user too, restricting job types, amounts and even access. You could use this to curb your color-happy associate’s printing habits, for example.
Print security
The above PaperCut print management software capability is especially helpful when handling private information. Think HIPAA, human resources and legal. If you are HR working in a shared space with other non-HR associates, the secure print release technology with your badge insures that only your eyes will see the document you are printing. This is because you must be at the printer to release the job to print.
Advanced scripting
With PaperCut, you can set rules in place to further reduce costs or increase efficiency. For example, we know ink-jet printers tend to be more expensive to use over time than toner-based printing devices. With this knowledge, if you are trying to keep costs down, you can put rules in place that send jobs 50 pages or larger to the toner-based printer rather than the small desktop ink-jet.
BYOD printing
Managed print software can make printing easier in bring your own device (BYOD) environments where users will be using their own laptops or mobile devices. PaperCut, for example, only requires users to follow a few simple steps to find and print to any printing device in the office, saving hassle in navigating to domains, finding print drivers or calling IT.
These are just a few of the possibilities a print management software like PaperCut has to offer organizations.
Hopefully, this has answered your question about what print management software is and what it can do.
If you are interested in implementing PaperCut for your organization’s print environment or just want to know more, we would love to hear from you.
