Education

CUSTOMER PROFILE

The customer is a university or college with multiple departments located on a single campus or at several scattered locations. Multiple study halls and laboratories are interconnected and equipped with an IT infrastructure.

Wired and wireless connectivity for students with notebooks or portable devices is also available. The customer uses either Windows or Linux, or there is a mixed operating system environment. All the users (students, teachers, etc.) are registered in a central directory and use ID cards for identification, access control, and payment for all sorts of services such as catering, accommodation, and soft drinks. 

 CUSTOMER GOAL AND VISION

The customer’s main goal is to offer unattended print, copy and scanning services to students and employees. The customer needs to track and charge for all these services. For student identification, the university wants to leverage its existing ID cards (such as ISIC/ITIC). For charging, it wants to use individual virtual accounts (a kind of virtual purse). 

CURRENT SITUATION AND PROBLEMS

Print, copy and scanning services are offered to students only at selected places on devices managed by operators in study departments, study rooms or libraries. These devices are not integrated, and it is not possible to track prints, copies or scans that the students make (200,000 to 1,200,000 pages per month). Integration with the user directory is not possible, so there is no way to automate user identification based on their ID cards. There is a very limited form of charging and no centralized solution for processing payments.

DEPLOYED SOLUTION

• YSoft SafeQ Professional edition or YSoft SafeQ Enterprise edition (depending on the demands on availability and 24×7 operation)
• YSoft SafeQ Credit System for managing user virtual credit accounts for charging
• YSoft SafeQ On-Line Accounting for precise and addressed accounting of all prints and copies
• YSoft SafeQ Terminal Professional or YSoft SafeQ Terminal Embedded
• YSoft SafeQ Self Service Recharging Station for unattended payment
• YSoft SafeQ Payment Gateway for Web-based payments (VISA or MC)
• Integration with the existing user directory. 

RESULTS AND BENEFITS

The implemented solution meets all the customer requirements and provides the following benefits:

• Integrates credit systems with virtual accounts for charging users for printing and copying.
• Tracks all print, copy and scan operations.
• Stores money for printing and copying in user virtual accounts that are totally under user control.
• Authenticates by means of existing user ID cards.
• If a payment system is already in place, integrates with that system and with the existing user directory, enabling seamless payments for print and copy services by means of existing user accounts.
• Enables employees to print and copy for free while still tracking all print and copy operations, preventing the use of devices for private purposes.
• Gives users the ability to print from workstations at which they are not authorized (such as when the user is logged in as a guest on a public computer).
• Reduces problems caused by incomplete or misprinted jobs because online accounting counts only pages that are actually printed.