Today we rolled out the culmination of a large project to update our campus printing environment. This service is somewhat like a ‘traffic cop’ managing communication between your computer and the printer and making sure everyone’s documents come out smoothly. It also enables services like “Follow Me Printing” which let you print a job and then select when and where to pick it up on-demand.

Here’s why we needed to do this project:

Reliable service: Over the past semesters, we experienced several outages of this service. It became clear that change was required to maintain the level of service we all expect. After all, printing should be a tool, not a roadblock. A project began to evaluate and plan the next generation of printing on campus with the goal of improved service reliability.

Friendlier names: The need to re-install printers on your computer presented an opportunity to improve a common frustration we hear from the community. Printer names at Wentworth have long been based upon building and room number combination that’s not exactly human-friendly. Unlike our MIT friends across the river, Wentworth’s culture doesn’t embrace building numbers. If you have to re-install them anyway, they might as well get better names too!

Innovative new features: We’re also excited about some future new features that this upgrade will enable, including a new interface for students to request, order, and pay for 3D printing and the ability to print from mobile and personally owned devices helping our day and CPCE students alike.

In the short time between semesters we have new first-year students arriving on campus, faculty both on and away from campus, and staff preparing for the Fall. To attempt to inform each of these stakeholder groups, we used a number of communication venues:

• E-Mail survey to solicit the most and least disruptive times from the campus
• A series of three e-mail reminders about the change
• Temporary reminder signage attached to printers
• Featured story on the Tech Spot website
• Digital Signage
• Tweets from @DTSatWIT
• Scheduled maintenance on our Service Status Page

Need help getting started? Learn more about Printing, Plotting, & Scanning.