Environmental Dashboard / Windows Live Tiles

One of the most powerful features in PaperCut is not actually a feature at all - it’s the culture change that it brings about in an organization. Most of this change is encouraged by increasing the visibility of the impact printing has on the company and the environment. The Environmental DashboardThe Environmental Dashboard is a desktop widget that presents data from PaperCut about the environmental impact of printing at both an individual user and organization level. This widget draws a user's attention to their printing impact and allows them to compare their usage to a benchmark. and the Windows Live TileThe Windows Live Tile allows you to pin the Environmental Dashboard to the Windows Start screen to create a dynamic Live Tile. This Live Tile will communicate over 20 user-specific facts, awards and challenges all generated from real-time PaperCut data. is an innovative way to raise awareness. It promotes paper saving in a positive and creative way. For example:

• See your environmental impact front and center

• Benchmark your usage against others in the organization

• Reward and promote good user behavior:

  • Award users for printing less

  • Encourage the user of duplex and grayscale

• It makes printing impact tangible and understandable:

  • Converting sheets into an "energy equivalent"

  • Emphasizing forest conservation

  • Highlighting CO₂ emissions

Windows Live Tile

The increasing use of devices running Windows with a tile based interface (featured in Windows 8 and above) has opened up a new avenue to communicate to users. You can pin the Environmental Dashboard page to the Windows Start Screen to create a dynamic Live Tile. This Live Tile communicates over 20 user-specific facts, awards and challenges all generated from real-time PaperCut data.

Sending a positive message with the Live Tile

All too often, the IT department is implementing back-end systems or invisible projects. The PaperCut Windows Live tile is a highly visible and positive story, and is a great complement to other changes planned in your print management program.

Tip:

Recently PaperCut was working with a large national retail organization and they were in the middle of a project to implement PaperCut’s secure print releaseSecure print release places print jobs in a holding state until the user authenticates and releases the job at the printer. This means sensitive print jobs will not sit uncollected on the printer.. There was push-back from various department heads worried that any barriers to printing were going to reduce productivity. The environmental impact statistics helped turn this reluctance around. In the end, the savings were so compelling the project’s success was promoted not only internally but externally as a strong corporate and social responsibility story. Oh, and for once the IT guy was the hero!

Some suggestions:

• Encourage your users to bookmark their dashboard

• Draw Windows users attention to the Live Tile and encourage them to Pin it to their start menu. See Windows Live Tile Installation.

• Link to the Environmental Dashboard on your intranet or monthly newsletter

• Share environmental impact information visually with management

• Challenge users to compare their live tile awards with their colleagues

Windows Live Tile examples

Below is a small sample of the 20+ tiles available: