Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/50188
TAKING CONTROL OF PRINT MACROS: SMALL CHANGES ADD UP TO MORE GREEN conversation where the user wants a printed record of the conclusion. There might be 10 or 20 messages in the "exchange" (no pun intended, but chuckles are accepted), but what needs to be captured is wholly contained in the last one or two replies. Outlook provides no granularity for such printing. The result? Ten to twelve pages are printed, and all but the first two are discarded. Cost-recovery vendors and print applications have created Outlook print dialogue enhancements that let users select the number of email messages to print ( , the last one, last two and so on). In some cases, users can also display a print preview that shows all pages of the email thread, giving the user the ability to select which pages to print. Utilizing this functionality, the number of pages printed is commonly reduced by 80 to 90 percent. BROKERING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN APPLICATIONS AND PRINTERS Print macros are the great underutilized tool in Microsoft Office. They're great because they can codify company efficiency policies and streamline complex activities for users, but they're underutilized because they are a pain. Upgrade to Outlook 2010, and you get an unwanted bonus project: redoing all your macros. When you buy a new MFD, macros are again likely to be underutilized because existing commands don't work with the MFD's driver. In a busy IT department, tackling a macro for a new device just doesn't bubble to the top of the project list. Suboptimal performance is accepted out of necessity. Or, in a slightly better scenario, print macros are made to work with new devices and applications, but that is achieved by keeping them simple, sacrificing more complex capabilities so they'll be more easily adaptable to application upgrades and device transitions. Macro automation solutions act as an intermediary between the application's print commands and the device's print drivers. Like Star Trek's "universal translator," a broker application translates for the applications and devices in a way that survives any changes to either side. By itself, that's a big win, eliminating painful subprojects like macro retrofitting when upgrading to Outlook 2010 or when considering a device upgrade. Macro automation also opens up potential efficiencies previously unavailable. Where macro use was previously limited because of the aforementioned sensitivity to changes, a broker application allows the extension of print macros to implement all sorts of efficiency and productivity tasks. Some examples include: • Implementing a policy where all documents printed for internal use are automatically printed two-sided (no action required by the user) and the brokering application directs the user to a printer that can satisfy the two-sided requirements of the job. • Applying a policy to reduce the use of toner by 15 to 20 percent for internal documents. • Automating the placement of watermarks on documents (confidential, draft, etc.) without requiring users to use the Windows print dialogues to do so. www.iltanet.org Tech Potpourri 45 e.g.