The Transition to Cloud-Based Student Printing

At Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, OH and Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA, student printing has traditionally used up a great deal of resources. This included hardware to maintain and replace, software to manage and deploy, and provision of supplies. Student printing also did not provide much in the way of convenience. While printing from a computer lab was easy enough, mobile printing was so painful at BWU that most students didn't use it, and Muhlenberg had not yet found a tenable solution. We did not provide for guest printing and color printing had to be sent to specific printers in specific locations. We had no campus card integration. In the Summer of 2015, BWU implemented wepa, a cloud-based printing solution to reduce the use of these resources while not only minimizing the impact to students, but providing additional opportunities to the students. Muhlenberg College launched wepa for the spring term, 2016. Come to this panel session to hear more about the challenges we faced, how we implemented wepa, and our lessons learned.