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A Printer in Every PotOne of the reasons people install local area networks is to be able to share printers. If that is one of YOUR reasons, forget about it. Networks are good for sharing data and providing connectivity for email, Internet and file transfer. They are also good for sharing resources that can be attached to the network. But, nowadays, sharing printers is not their best use. Back in the days when a basic laser printer cost over $3,000, you had no other choice but to share it across all of the users in your network. But now, with excellent, high quality, color printers available for less than $500, you really should just give everyone their own. After all, is the network supposed to save you money, or is it supposed to make your staff more productive? If you just want to save money, don't buy a network. But if you want to make your people more productive, then give them their own printers. Look at the way people use printers in your office. They send a job to the printer, walk to the printer, which may be more than a few steps away, chat with people on the way, and chat with whoever is waiting for THEIR 500-page print job (with graphics). After standing around the printer for five or ten minutes, they chat their way back to their cubicles. Now, let's complicate things. Your employees frequently need to print on letterhead, forms, pre-punched paper, labels, or premium paper. To do this, they have to run to the printer, load the paper, run back to their computer, send the print job, and run back to the printer. Of course, in the meantime, someone else sent a print job that spoiled all that nice expensive bond paper. By giving everyone their own printer, you eliminate all this nonsense. You can even be environmentally friendly. I have a printer on my desk, and I print out lots of stuff (I find I can proofread better if I print it out and read it like normal people). When I'm finished with the paper, I'll throw it in my "recycle" bin. When I know I'm about to print something that I'll throw away, such as a draft of a column, I'll reach into my recycle bin, load some paper in the printer, and voila! I've just been a friend of the Earth, and I can feel just a little smug. You can't do that with a shared printer. One negative is that having their own printers might encourage your employees to print more personal material, like resumes and club newsletters. Conversely, it'll prevent confidential information from lying in the shared printer for a couple of hours because someone forgot to retrieve their job. Think about doing this with fax machines too. If you have someone who receives and sends a lot of faxes, it might be more cost effective to install one at their desk, as opposed to having them shlep to the mail room all the time. Since fax machines require a phone line, this does require a little more consideration. If you're into more cost effective office supplies, giving everyone their own printer also allows you to track paper and ink usage, by individual. This may be overkill, but I know there are some left-brained people out there that will love this part. What's the rule of thumb? Easy. Give everyone their own printer if they're a typical office user. Now, that might not be practical if you're thinking about one of those digital copiers that staples, sorts, collates, etc. If nothing else, it probably won't fit in the cubicles. And plotters are also expensive enough that they need to be a shared resource. Give your employees easy access to the resources they frequently need to do their jobs. Putting a printer on everyone's desk helps. It might be more expensive initially, but it'll pay off in lower materials cost and higher productivity. Of course, with less walking back and forth to the printer, your staff may forget each others' names when you get together for the Christmas party. And no, Hewlett-Packard and Epson did not sponsor this column.
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