Solution for the printing needs of staff and senior students

Tuesday, 19 August 2003 - St Francis Xavier College was established in 1985 to serve the Catholic youth of Newcastle and surrounding districts during their last two years of secondary schooling. As such, it is seen as acontinuation of the Catholic Education system founded in the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle more than a hundred years ago.

The establishment of the College was a result of a major restructuring of Catholic schools in the Newcastle area. An essential principle of this restructuring was to establish a system that would provide equality of access and opportunity for both boys and girls,thereby eliminating some of the inequality that existed throughout the city at that point in the area's history.

"We have a staff of 120 and more than 1000 students. This means we need great expediency in our printing because teachers continually need to make class sets of 25 copies at short notice. There's no time for jams or hold ups in this environment and Canon's equipment has always proven to be very reliable?" Carol Vandenberg, Administrator, Print Room, St Francis Xavier College.

St Francis Xavier College in Hamilton, New South Wales needed a printing solution that would cover its diverse printing needs. Printing requirements range from staff producing class documentation and newsletters, resourcing of adedicated printing room, through to empowering students to print and copy their own educational material in the school library.

The College selected Canon as its printing technology supplier based on the capabilities of its equipment and the simplicity of its use. Multifunction devices, such as those selected by the college, also enable staff and students to print from remote locations over the school's network in addition to scanning documents as well as collating the material produced.

- The College's sizeable student population and staff all require reliable and capable printing solutions on a dailybasis.

- As St Francis Xavier College prints such a diverse range of material, it required machines to suit multiple printingtasks.

"As a school, we need to produce a broad variety of documents," said Carol Vandenberg, Print Room Administrator, StFrancis Xavier College. "We need to print everything from class materials for an average class size of 25 or the A3-sized fortnightly College newsletter, right through to manuals which we put together for the four junior schools whose students will attend our College in their senior years."

Printers are also required to produce the large number of overhead transparencies that are used in classrooms.

While some printers are located in the College's dedicated printing room, others are in common areas accessible to students and staff and therefore require a high degree of user-friendliness.

- Larger capacity multi-function devices (MFDs) have replaced older devices of lower capacities throughout StFrancis Xavier College

- One of the imageRUNNER 8500 machines is networked to executive staff at the school, enabling staff to print remotely from their PCs at 85ppm.

The largest devices in the printing fleet at St Francis Xavier College, the imageRUNNER 8500s were installed in 2002 and are the newest devices at the school. The introduction of these MFDs in particular, has provided new capabilities to both teaching and support staff when preparing the numerous documents required in classes, the office and external correspondence.

"The machines do a lot of work. The volume of printing between February 2002 and February 2003 was 2,835,000 sheets," said Ms Vandenberg.

Executive staff at the College also have a network connection to one of the iR8500s, demonstrating the ability for Canon business devices to be networked and used as the printing location for jobs originating on a PC. The College's weekly 'Lighthouse' newsletter and other booklets are processed in this manner, rather than photocopied in the traditional style.

Prior to selecting Canon equipment, the school - quite appropriately - did its homework on Canon and its competition in the marketplace.

"We went to exhibitions and invitation days to look at other machines," said Ms Vandenberg. "And we've had other brand machines at times and different aspects of those have been good, but we just found that we came back to Canon because the service and the reliability is fantastic."

The school also operates smaller Canon machines, such as a GP605, NP6030 and iR1600 in several "behind thescenes" locations, including the principal's office and adjoining monastery, where they are used for day-to-day office printing requirements, including forms and school correspondence.

- Staff at St Francis Xavier College can now create complex documents with ease, including automatic stapling andcollation directly from a PC

- The school now saves money - and the environment - by printing double-sided documents in addition to reducingpage sizes.

"Stapling, scanning and folding through the iR8500 is wonderful," said Ms Vandenberg. "The collating is also incredible and we're doing more and more with its memory function, which is very handy and time-saving."

Using memory mode, for example, the school is printing booklets that have different coloured paper for each chapter. Having material stored in memory allows staff in the printer room to access all paper decks in the machine, eachloaded with a different colour paper, for the one job. This has alleviated many hours of manual collation for staff.

Memory mode is also used for items that are printed very regularly. This is a great time saver which avoids having tomanually input new details into the document every time.

The school also saves money by ensuring that material is printed double-sided using the iR8500's easy to use papermanagement facilities. Where appropriate, pages can also be reduced so that four pages of material can be delivered to students on one double-sided A4 sheet.

Since the time, 14 years ago, when St Francis Xavier College first replaced a traditional ink stencil duplicator with its first Canon copier, it has enjoyed a relationship with Canon products.

"The people from the local reseller who provide and service our equipment are like family to us as some are actually ex-students," said Ms Vandenberg. "Their service is excellent and present themselves in a very professional manner,which reflects well on Canon. If we do need to call them for anything, they're here in a very short period of time."