School eliminates 400 'phantom' devices with Xerox managed print services

Haven't written about the paper management side of green IT in a while, so this item comes at a great juncture: The Rialto Unified School District in California believes it will cut nearly $500,000 from its printing budget -- and seriously consolidate the number of devices it is supporting -- through Xerox Enterprise Print Services.

The school district has signed a five-year contract, under which it already has reduced the number of printers that it supports by more than 50 percent -- including 400 printers that it didn't even know were living on networks across its 25 buildings. One of the new features that is being touted as part of this deal is something called print governance. This is an application that monitors the efficiency of print jobs in the queue and tells the person who requested it whether the way they have chosen to print it is really the most efficient way to create it. So, for example, if a teacher wants to print a 250-page document, the software would remind him or her that it would be better to send this job to the print center.