Member Article

Equitrac Excels in Education at Magdalen College School

~~Schools in England are expected to have less to spend per pupil over the next five years according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, so IT solutions are going to have to prove that they can deliver against any claims they make about improving efficiency if they’re to stand a chance of being considered for deployment. One solution already proving its worth in education and delivering a return on investment is Nuance Equitrac Express. Deployed at Magdalen College School in Brackley, Northamptonshire, Equitrac is helping the school to reduce print volumes and make it easier to recharge departments for document output, bringing efficiency and cost control to print. Banishing unreliability in education Chris Davis, IT Manager at Magdalen College School, explains the efficiency benefits it delivers to the school, which is home to 1,300 students. “In the past, we used another print management solution. It was slow, complicated to use, and unreliable. When it did go wrong, it would often take hours to fix.” Chris would receive complaints almost on a daily basis about printing being slow, and scanning and photocopying being difficult. Determined it was time for a change to both its multi-function printers (MFPs) and its former print solution, Chris invited several MPF resellers to discuss their potential solutions to his print challenge. “From the print management solutions, I wanted ease of use and ease of integration. I wanted a solution that was hassle free and would be very simple to operate.” Some of the vendors’ solutions were easy to dismiss as they included the print solution Chris was already using. However, one stood out – a combination of new MFPs and Nuance’s Equitrac. “I was really impressed by two things; it could adhere to the new print rules we wanted to implement and it seemed very easy to use.” Chris also liked the fact that unlike the former solution, Equitrac’s clients didn’t need to be installed on each user’s PC. Everything under control with Equitrac Today, Equitrac features on the MFP devices located in public places, and in the ICT Suite in the school’s library. The Follow-You Printing gives students the flexibility to select which device to release their print from, having entered their PIN code. The print rules Chris wanted to introduce now govern the number of prints a teacher can produce, ensuring that larger print runs are assigned to the departmental printers, while printing in black and white helps to control costs further, making Equitrac ideally suited to an education environment. Complementing Equitrac in education is Nuance’s eCopy ShareScan. It offers easy integration with School Information Management Systems (SIMS), thanks to its SIMS Connector helping school administrators and bursars to be more productive. It achieves this by making it easier to unlock information in paper documents, capture the information electronically, and then add the new information to students’ files on SIMS. This leads to improved information and document accuracy, retention and management. As well as making access to student documents quicker and easier, by moving away from paper-based archiving to secure digital media, schools can reduce paper usage and also ensure that sensitive or confidential information about students is protected by network and SIMS permissions. A further advantage of using SIMS for documents is that schools have the assurance that they are protected by a disaster recovery archive. Combined with Equitrac, eCopy ShareScan presents schools with a solution designed to excel in education. Complaint free and fully supported Speaking about using Equitrac day to day, Chris is adamant that the school has made the right investment and he’s already beginning to see the benefits. “First, I’m not getting any more complaints about print. Second, it has proved to be every bit as easy to use and as reliable as was promised during the demo. Third – and this really matters to me – if ever I have a question or query about Equitrac, there seems to be more access to experts who have been trained on it. I don’t have to work to track down someone from a small, specialist team to get a question answered. The Equitrac support desk is extremely helpful.” At a time of shrinking budgets for education, Magdalen College School is proof that Equitrac enables print costs to be controlled and reclaimed and with very little outlay. This means it will keep a school’s head of finances happy, just as much as the support staff responsible for maintaining its print fleet.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Pete Jackson .