In a little business that uses a couple of printers in a single office, you are most likely not concerned with your printing expenses. But, if you are in charge of a big infrastructure operating hundreds of different printing devices, these costs do affect your company's budget and you should probably look at some ways to optimize the usage of your company printers and minimize costs.

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

" Log all print tasks on all your print servers in your company. 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 job.

" Keep all documents that go through the printer as images for later reviewing. The first page of the file 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 twice previous to printing out own documents and data that was not intended to be printed in your company.

" Manage all the print servers in our corporation from the one point. You need centralized print task information storage space and one monitoring program, scheduled printer usage reporting, notifications and reports delivery for administrators.

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

" A limited set of printing information should be accessible for personnel. They will see the print management in action.

" Be able to set limits for users, groups, printers and for whole print server. It can reduce your printing charges dramatically. Limits for printing are very powerful and effective instrument for charge management on printing in your corporation. Limiting printing actions for some workers, you can really save on a paper, a toner for printers (especial at a color printing), costs for get working again and service for printers.

Take a look on HSLAB Print Logger print manager program. This is a comprehensive and extremely professional enterprise-level solution for monitoring 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 saving a lot of them almost immediately.

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