Columbia College Transforms Their Student Printing Experience

The Objective

Columbia College has always been early innovators when it comes adapting new solutions for their campus, like cloud services and printing in a wireless world. They were looking for a new printing solution that needed to fulfill vital criteria:

• The printing solution needed to be a completely self-service and self managed print system with an option for file to print.
• Includes a mobile print solution that would work with virtually any mobile or internet connected device.
• Needs a customized account management system with card access and a private cloud to allow students to manage their own accounts on-line.

It would have to be a unique file-to-print solution with a secure print and financial management system to fulfill the printing requirements of the entire college. Higher education institutions like Columbia College, are facing challenges like broad competition, complex technological changes, and overall increased costs. IT admin are forced to devote part of their focus into print management and IT systems rather than their main focus which should be education.

The Solution

After performing an in-depth analysis of the requirements needed, such as maintenance, proximity, quantity, and types of print, ePRINTit provided a print solution designed to accommodate the needs of today’s higher education institutions.
The solution included 8 ePRINTit self-serve kiosk stations using HP printers and Citizen CX Photo printers, meaning every kiosk can create many different types of prints. Columbia also provided LDAP integration for the ePRINTit kiosks which allows students to tag user cards linking to their own private, secure cloud-based account with all financial transactions and account balances.

By working closely together with ePRINTit to develop new print solutions, new programs were written, tested, and approved in less than 8 weeks with a customized GUI designed specifically for Columbia College being implemented to all touchscreens.

Students can now print from anywhere, including their homes, personal computers, and labs thanks to the software defined print solution with custom design file to print options developed by the ePRINTit program team.

The Benefits

All students in Columbia College now have their own custom cloud repository with printing capabilities and the ability to manage their financial accounts in one solution. The College has full administrator access to these accounts to help assist students and report for expense purposes.

Every print station can create 120,000 prints per month with each kiosk being able to replace up to 500 redundant printers. Students no longer need to spend as much on printing jobs with Columbia College saving money from reduced electrical costs and an expected reduction of print volume by 30%!

No matter where students are, whether on campus or off, with the ePRINTit app they are connected with more than 30,000 locations around the world with an unique, convenient, and covetable advantage of printing from any mobile device.

Columbia College would only be responsible for minimum monthly volumes aggregated across all units with ePRINTit covering all other capital costs. ePRINTit is not only changing the printing technology model, but the entire printing business model, allowing schools like Columbia College to focus on education and providing innovative flexible solutions to their campus.