More than 4,000 students print with their personal hardware and their student ID

ThinPrint Personal Printing and its Release Stations ensure secure, cost-effective printing at 17 central printing stations at the Vocational Training Centre in Olten, Switzerland.‍

The Vocational Training Centre Olten (BBZ Olten) in Switzerland is a regional vocational training centre with a flexible and diverse educational spectrum. Around 4,300 learners and adults in 25 professions complete their basic or advanced vocational training here. About 300 teachers and lecturers are at hand to teach the young professionals with great enthusiasm and commitment. To make sure everything runs smoothly, 50 employees from the services department maintain the required infrastructure for teaching – including a fleet of printers.

The BBZ used to have more than 100 printers. Later, the number of devices was reduced, first to 80, then to 60. Benjamin Staufer wanted pivot away from this large number of printers in many different rooms. The goal was to have a much smaller number of multifunction printers (MFPs) in central locations. He also wanted to significantly reduce the number of printer drivers needed and wanted each student to be able to print with their private device too.

To achieve this, the BBZ decided on ThinPrint Personal Printing. The solution offers a personal printing driver for Windows and one for MacOS. Once this driver is installed, every student can print. One of the things that impressed Benjamin Staufer the most about Personal Printing was the solution’s ability to work with printers from different manufacturers. To print, each user needs an AD login and a student ID card with an RFID chip. The student starts by printing off a document from any device and goes to any of the now 17 printing stations as usual. Each student authenticates themselves at one of the Personal Printing Release Stations with their ID card to start the printout. If they change their mind or do not start the print job, it is automatically deleted after 24 hours. Mr. Staufer is convinced that unnecessary printouts are often avoided in this way. Forgotten printouts in the printer tray are a thing of the past and each print job always makes it into the correct hands.

If you speak German, you can watch the Germanspeaking video interview with Benjamin Staufer, Head of IT Services of the Vocational Training Centre Olten, Solothurn, on Youtube.