Increased printer life...
Full campus ID Integration...
Itemized print job listings & releasing...
Dramatically decreased lab paper usage...
Affordable color printing for public computer labs.

These are just a few of the many reasons for utilizing the new campus print management system known as UniPrint. In place within most major public computer labs by the end of the Spring 2003 semester, Uniprint has already advanced the state of campus printing by providing SCSU with both greater flexibility in deployment of new services (color printing), as well as better tracking of current services (print usage across campus).

To see just how Uniprint works, click on any of the links to each step below:

General Overview
Step 1: Personalized Print-Outs
Step 2: Queued Printing
Step 3: Student ID Printing

Uniprint works across multiple levels to uniquely identify each print job with a specific user, organize/queue print jobs at a central "release station" and automatically debit user accounts for any specialized printing services (such as color printing) before printing out a copy at a room's printers.

You can think of the Uniprint printing process as similar to the following diagram:

General Overview of the UniPrint Printing Procedure
User tells computer to print a document		Document is queued at the Printer Release Station		Document is released and sent to the printer(s)

Remember the last time you printed out something in a busy public computer lab? In most public environments collecting your print-outs is akin to hacking your way through a dense jungle with a dull machette. Many print-outs lie uncollected, clogging the output trays of the lab printers. Many more continuously pour, uncontrolled, out of the paper trays because the person who printed right before you didn't realize that the webpage he/she chose to print was 250 pages long.

A better solution would be to tie each print-out to a specific user so that when you go to pick up your print-out, your job is identified as yours and yours alone. Beginning in the Fall semester of 2003, this is just one of the great benefits that individual logins at each public computer will make possible. Having logged in to the computer you are at already, any print-out you make from that point on is automatically tied to your unique student login/MySCSU ID.

But what if you can't make it over to the printers right away? Perhaps you have other tasks you are working on. Clearly you do not want to have someone else steal the print-out of your final Stats exam. Previously you might have had to rush over to the printers right away, push your way through a dozen other people scrambling for print-outs, and hope that, once you found your paper, all the pages were still there.

With Uniprint, once identified as your print-out, a specialized computer identified as the Print Release Station temporarily queues your print-out until you arrive at the printer area to pick up your job. In this way incidences of printer groupies all grabbing for a slew of nameless print-outs are drastically reduced. You know exactly which job is yours because only after you release your print-out does it even get sent to the printer.

So now that you have a print-job with our name on it, how do you release that job to the lab printers? How might you handle situations in which you want to print your latest art portfolio in color at $X/page one day and on freely-available black and white the next? The same way you might purchase a soda or bag of chips from a campus vending machine - your student ID of course!

To release your print job from a Print Release Station on campus, simply:

1. Swipe your school ID at the Print Release Station
2. Choose your print-job in the list of queued jobs
3. Hit the Print button in the lower-right corner

   Note: you can see any print charges you will accrue any time you print by checking the Print Total area directly next to the Print button on the release station screen.

Congratulations - your paper is off to the printers! If your job is color, the appropriate print charge is automatically totalled and debited from your account balance.

Best of all there's no tedious credit card signatures or confusing PIN numbers required.
Just you, your computer login ID, and your student ID.