In a small business that uses a couple of printers in a one office, you are most likely not worried with your printing expenses. But, if you are in charge of a big infrastructure operating hundreds of different printing devices, these expenses do affect your company's resources and you should most likely look at some ways to optimize the usage of your corporate printers and reduce costs.

Let's see what you print mainly in your office. You don't know? The staff simply send jobs to the printer over your net and print server does not provide a way to check this? Uncontrolled printer always costs you additional money! It disappoints your personnel, threat your corporate security and wastes everyone's time. In order to start economy we need a print manager utility. You should start to manage your printing. You need software that would do the following:

" Log all print jobs on all your print servers in your organization. The log should include data for each document about the user who sent it to the printer, printer options, ink/toner yield and the price of this printer task.

" Save all documents that go through the printer as images for later reviewing. The first page of the document is enough. You cannot rely on the titles only. You know how often they do not match the content. It is very good for security reasons too. If employees know that theirs print jobs are managed, they'll think two times before printing out personal files and data that was not intended to be printed in your corporation.

" Manage all the print servers in our company from the one place. You need centralized print task information storage and one monitoring utility, scheduled printer usage reporting, notifications and information delivery for administrators.

" Be accessible over the network and maybe from the Internet for geographically-distributed divisions (with access control of course). Preferably with a web browser for simpler access or with management console

" A restricted set of printing statistics should be accessible for staff. They will see the print management in action.

" Be able to set limits for customers, groups, printers and for whole print server. It can lower your printing expenses dramatically. Limits for printing are very powerful and effective instrument for cost management on printing in your business. Limiting printing actions for some personnel, you can really save on a paper, a toner for printers (especial at a color printing), costs for restore and service for printers.

Have a look on HSLAB Print Logger print manager program. This is a comprehensive and extremely professional enterprise-level solution for keeping track of the usage of numerous printers connected to print servers in your business and limiting it on the basis of a range of criteria. Prices start at $39. Exactly the half cost of one cartridge for our laser printer. Not a bad since you'll be economy a lot of them almost immediately.

The program continuously monitors print jobs submitted by users to print servers and saves this data to its own or corporate database, which greatly facilitates reporting and subsequent charge analysis. HSLAB Print Logger can be installed as a Windows 2000...2008 service and enables you to create ad hoc HTML reports and access them from any location over the TCP/IP protocol. The network administrator can restrict access to statistical data for certain users, user groups or IP addresses. Print Logger utility available in several editions. This allows to best fit customers' requirements.