Exeter Adjusts to Wireless Printing

Exeter’s Internet Technology Services Department (ITS) has implemented wireless printing on campus this year. The uPrint system aims to shrink the lines of panicked students rushing to print between classes and increase the ease and efficiency of printing in general.uPrint was implemented at the beginning of this school year to encourage a more convenient and quicker process for printing with school printers by allowing for students to print wirelessly to any of the seven supported printers on campus. After students send a file to print from their computers or tablets, the file is put on hold until the student swipes their Lioncard or type their credentials into school computer. Supported printers are located in the library, the computer science lab, the Academy building basement and the basement of Phillips Hall.With the introduction of a tablet program at Exeter, IT decided it was time to upgrade the campus’s printing software. They began to look into the service during the spring and spent the summer working on its implementation. One of their main goals was to reduce lines at campus printers.“This [uPrint] should save students time—when they are done with a paper, they can send it to the uPrint queue and then walk up to any one of the public printers, swipe their ID card, select their job and it will print,” Diane Fandrich, director of ITS, explained.Another convenient aspect of uPrint is the ability to pick up your paper from any of the printers around campus. Library Systems Coordinator and Reference Librarian Melinda Dolan explained how this feature could prove very useful for students.“If students think ahead and print from their tablet or their computer in their dorm room to the uPrint queue, then the uPrint queue will hold those print jobs for 24 hours,” she said.“Then anywhere they are going they can release the print job on the way with just a swipe of their ID card, saving a lot of time.”However, before students can print wirelessly, they must download and install an app or driver on their computer or tablet. Although this process only needs to be completed once, lower Darius Kahan saw this as a major difficulty.“I have a Windows 8 laptop and on the Exeter Connect website there are ten pages describing how to download the uPrint driver on to it,” he said.“I think that is unfortunate for the people who thought this through because it sounds like such a great idea, but the installation process seems overly complicated.”On the other hand, Kahan was impressed by how detailed the instructions were for the installation process.“The instructions do seem very detailed which should ease the process of installing the driver on either your tablet or computer,” he said.“It’s also not IT’s fault because this setup is also probably the simplest way to print with uPrint.”Dolan was concerned with the suddenness of the Academy’s transition into uPrint. Dolan explains, “It was a little shorter time frame then we would have liked because there were no students around and it was right before the beginning of the term.”Even with the shorter time frame, many of the Academy staff such as Academy Librarian Gail Scanlon felt well prepared for the addition of uPrint. According to Scanlon, all the library staff were trained on the system and will be able to guide students through the process of printing from the library as well as releasing their print jobs.There will also be student techs working from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday in the library to assist students with the new printing system and IT staff in their office available for support.Scanlon hopes that the implementation of uPrint will make students and faculty more aware of the amount they print.“Every day we come across piles of unwanted copies stacked next to the printers. But now with uPrint you can see how many jobs you have sent to the printer and you can release only the ones you need and delete the others. I am hopeful the uPrint system will significantly decrease the amount of erroneous printing.”Along with the decrease in wasted paper, many are hopeful that uPrint will also lessen the amount of personal printers at Exeter.“I think that students and faculty who have their own personal printers will still continue to use them when they are working in proximity to their printers,” Fandrich said.“This service will provide those people with an alternative to using their own printers, but I don’t expect it will replace them.”The early stages of development for uPrint inevitably evoke technological difficulties. However, upper Weihang Fan believes that the advantage of this new technology is definite.“[uPrint] is an upgrade because it makes printing more convenient for a significant percentage of the student body,” Fan said.