Hybrid service slashes printer waste

There's a new hybrid service in the cloud that helps your workers go green and stay green by saving paper. Want to know which district office in your company prints more pages than anyone else? Interested in which applications waste the most paper? Concerned about exactly how much you spend on printing?

You can get those answers and more late next quarter from a new service by GreenPrint Technologies Inc. of Portland, Ore., whose mission is to save PC printer paper. Good for the environment and better for your pocketbook.

The company's print driver installs on Windows and Mac personal computers and reviews pages in a document that's scheduled to print. It shows you wasted pages in, say, Excel, where a few extra columns or rows create unnecessary pages that would otherwise get printed then immediately tossed aside, usually littered in precarious piles around the network printer.

According to James Kellerman, chief technology officer for GreenPrint, the new service takes data directly from each machine's driver and lets managers see workers' printing habits, which applications crank out the most pages and how much it really costs an organization.

He says companies are likely to find e-mail is among the most paper-hungry applications, which is ironic considering it is historically seen as basic building block to the paperless office. Excel is another bad boy at wasting paper.

When GreenPrint gets installed users cut their paper consumption by up to 25%, says Kellerman, because they only print what they truly need. And that's good news since it costs between 6 and 10 cents per printed page, GreenPrint and third-party research has shown. Although you can use the pricing metrics included with the upcoming GreenPrint service, you can also customize the amount based on your own company's experience paying for paper and ink.

Pricing for GreenPrint varies from an advertising-supported free consumer version to site licenses for Fortune 1000 companies.