Often I print from a computer only to find that the printer I have chosen is out of order. How about a twitter account devoted to middlebury printers that displays what printers are out of order or offline, so students could check before they click print. This twitter account could easily be updated by the help desk or the tech center.
From Brendan Mahoney
Hi Brendan
Thanks for this idea. As you may know, we are revising the way printing works in the library, and we agree that having some sort of publicly accessible status update page or service should be a part of the new system. We’re not completely convinced that Twitter is the best solution, although it might well be part of a suite of tools that we could make available to provide realtime updates. We’ll be sure to discuss this with our soon-to-be-named printer czar.
One way you can check status is by going to Start – Printers and Faxes. Look for the printer you wish to send the job to. If the status says error, there is probably something currently wrong with the device.
If the status says ready and you see a number under the documents column, those are jobs that have been sent and are either in the process of printing, or waiting to be released.