A centralized printing solution for Western Australia’s biggest Catholic School provider

CEWA needed a secure, BYOD-friendly solution that could seamlessly manage the entire network from one central location. So, they turned to PaperCut MF.

With a single installation of PaperCut, CEWA’s office can now manage printer deployment centrally through Azure and CEWA’s data centers, while giving school IT staff delegated access to manage printers and users within their own environments. For CEWA it’s the perfect mix of cloud flexibility and on-prem resilience.

“For the schools with ageing print servers, we were able to offer them a centralized solution,” Haydn says, “and we were also able to onboard the schools that weren’t using PaperCut at all.

“Now, if you’re an IT staff member at a school, even if you’re only part-time, you get access to the PaperCut interface, and you can run basically 90% of the functionality yourself,” Haydn says. “But the biggest carrot is that schools can now go serverless and it’s also removed the administrative overhead.”

“This ties into our mandate for equity,” says Ben Beaton, Team Leader of Digital Services and Partner Engagement. “Equity of access and equity of access to resources. Some of our little Catholic primary schools are mere specks on the landscape, but now they have the same print technology as a large, well-resourced K–12 school.

At last count, there are 831 individual printers on the CEWA central PaperCut environment, spread over 91 locations from Broome to Albany. 217 of those are embedded devices.

Since the PaperCut MF rollout, CEWA has successfully printed over 23 million jobs (with some days topping over 150,000 pages). But the real benefit has been unlocking a sense of efficiency and scale, with the head office team able to manage, report, audit and streamline print management for each individual school, all on the one platform.

Ben explains, “now we can run reports for them, we can track who’s printing the most, stuff like that. Before PaperCut, all they had was an old Windows print server, so they were missing out on all these great features.”

“Thanks to this print architecture we’ve been able to achieve, we’ve noticed significant cost savings, too. Over the next 12 to 18 months, we’ll be deepening the reporting on that.”