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The Joel on Software Discussion Group (CLOSED)

For shared or cubicle office, what do you think is the minimum of network printer to person ratio? Should every printing station provide 2 printers: b/w and color?

67-1

well that rather depends how much printing you do per person.  also consider if your printing needs are evenly dispersed or bunched together e.g. always a mad rush at universities toward the end of the academic year. either way you are probably in best position to answer this, maybe measure some print queue times over a typical week etc.

53:1

I would think the minimum would be one printer per person. any more printers than that and the user would have to be printing multiple jobs at the same time. That is crazy!

Aren't most offices electronic now? 57-1.

It depends on how fast the printer is.  1 printer that prints crazy fast like 60 pages a minute is better than 10 printers that print 5 pages a minute (until the 1 printer breaks... but that is another story). 

My final answer:
It depends on how much printing is done, how fast the network is and how fast the printers print. 

If you have a line of cranky people at the printers all of the time, you need more or BETTER printers.

67:1
57:1
53:1

That as a printer-to-person ratio is a little higher than I would have expected.  I can find ways to make use of 25 printers, but 67?  I guess I can work on printing out the entire Internet in book form like I've always been meaning to.

Man, I was about to tell you all we have 1:10 but I can see now that's grossly inadequate.

Depends on how many of your users can read

What's a printer?

Totally depends on your office and what you do.  I've printed about 5 pages so far this year.  2 of those were expedia itineraries.

we have 1 printer for 150 people here, and i have never found someone near the printer when i'm going to pick something

Take what you have and see how people gather. If the crowd is too big, add another printer in another area handy for those using it. Repeat until you reach a reasonable flow.

Then do a printer and head count.

42

Hey... it's the answer to everything.

In many developing countries, one job responsiblity of a  department manager is to ensure that the toner is not used up too quickly. The whole floor (~200) shares a printer.

There is a company here in Arizona that strives for a 1:1 ratio. That's right, everyone gets their own computer/laptop, and a $50-$150 ink jet printer. And the supply rooms are stocked with ink cartridges.

In the past, when one went down, then 25-50 people couldn't print, which I guess was a disaster.

Also, since the personal printer was so small and slow, people printed out less.

Additionally, when people complained of printing problems, then the "IT guy" would just swap it with an identical model in about 5 minutes. I haven't seen a copier tech fix anything in 5 minutes.

Scary, but true.

Dons flame suit,
Zumbas

Depends on :
- How many people have computers
- How much does each one print, some users may need a personal printer.


Here's a setup I have seen in one location:
50 users share a printer (HPLJ5100tn), another 6 share a printer (HPLJ5100n), and 3 have their own personal printers (HPLJ24XXd).

So the better question is, how much "paper" do you need to process on a daily basis?

Between the high cost of toner and ink cartridges, and our desire to be environmentally friendly, we've made a concious effort to minimize our use of paper. We refrain from printing handouts for meetings, we print double sided, we recyle paper if we can (make notes on the back of prior printouts), two or four "pages" to each side of a sheet of paper if appropriate, and even have a dedicated, efficiency-minded printing and copying facility for bulk jobs.

We have maybe 1 printer for every 150 people and I very rarely ever have to wait at the local printer for my job.

Then again, I've been places where the ratio was 15:1 and there were still lines and queues because they insisted on printing everything.

The receptionist emailed a new building telephone list this morning which I like to tape up next to my phone, so my use for a printer this week was exactly 2 pages. This is fairly typical for me. Some people might do as much as 2 or 4 pages a day.

SumoRunner,

Get out of the ston eage, that's what Outlook or an Intranet are for, just search.  I've implemented 3 phone directories in my career, each one was hailed for their simplicity (can search by name, dept, phone number, building, etc).

Even better when you use an IE shortcut and in your URL window I just type "phone fred" and I get all the Freds or "phone fred it" for Freds in IT.

So how do you look up the phone number of the Network Engineer when your network goes down?

It sounded stupid when they first handed them out, but now I appreciate the simplicity of mouse pads with our technical support department's phone number printed on them.

Depends on the office. You want them close enough to everyone that you don't end up with lots of orphan print jobs that people forget about, but far enough away that the noise doesn't bother people.

Obviously depends on the line of business. One per office, which can be anything from one per person to one per ten people.

With electronic communication there is not going to be a great deal of printing so costs of material are not too important a factor compared to the inconvenience of having to go and pick up print jobs.

We are at 1:15, but it has more to do with location that the number of people.  People only complain about walking to a printer, never about waiting for a printout.

0:1  Just go out and buy a 100 dollar Brother laser printer and plomp it on your desk.

"It sounded stupid when they first handed them out, but now I appreciate the simplicity of mouse pads with our technical support department's phone number printed on them."

Hurray for IP telephony! When the network is down, nobody can reach Technical Support :)

> In the past, when one went down, then 25-50 people couldn't print, which I guess was a disaster.

If people are printing constantly, fine.

If not, then 2 printers for those 25-50 people are fine, because it doesn't take long to go and buy another backup when the first fails and you switch to the backup.