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Whether they come from convergent technologies between the copy and printing worlds or from the will of company management to reduce its consumables budgets, or from the desire of IT services to optimize their equipment or simply to assure a better quality of service at the best price, the first questions are always the same:

Watchdoc - The Ten Most Important Benefits.

Financial Benefits

Properly understanding the number of pages produced in the study, the type of documents and application used, as well as the peripherals being used, will allow precise quantification of the costs directly associated with them; and thus contribute towards reducing them.

According to the Gartner Group, direct costs represent approximately 50% of the global cost of a printer over 3 years. There is still work to do on the indirect costs, which represent 50% of the total.
There also the Watchdoc solution will give you the means to address these costs.
The economies obtained by applying the usage rules of your "Printing Policy", are 30% during the first years.

Consequently, your R.O.I. is regularly less than 6 months...!

Functional Benefits

As a matter of experience, the primary function of support to users (hot line, training, administration), is often related to printing.

Who has not encountered the following situations:

	The print job is sent, but does not print, "I click OK but nothing happens!" "
	The user has walked up to the printer only to find that some of his colleagues are already waiting for their documents, so reprints elsewhere!
	The printer has run out of toner and/or paper... and the document we are waiting for is urgent...
	Who printed the "Letter" format document? The print queue is blocked!
	Whose do these printed pages belong to - the ones that no one has come to retrieve and that are going to end up in the waste basket ...

as well as the blockages, the breakdowns (without a maintenance call being made)...

A large number of these situations arise from the difficulty of foreseeing them, therefore creating dissatisfied users and a loss of productivity for the company.
 
With Watchdoc, your capacity for planning will greatly increase.

Permanent monitoring the status of your printers

Using to the best of their capacities means to also monitor constantly

 
A complete history to plan the future  

Click the image to enlarge

A dynamic view, to better analyze printing volumes, and to predict

Watchdoc's functions 

Why Watchdoc?

With color printing becoming more and more widespread throughout our corporations, and with internal and external documents more and more rich, often illustrated with color graphics and photography, costs for the printing post are increasing exponentially (+ than 240 billion pages in France for 2004).
Financial and general management, faced with this heavy cost, are demanding reductions of these budgets, and a better quality of service for "inside clients".
The IT Services and the General Services must work together, their needs have now come face to face!
Part of the solution is driven by the convergent technologies:
« printing-copy-fax scan to mail » and therefore technical performance and globally superior economies.
...With a few reservations: color (and its high costs), concentration of printers and copiers ... availability problems ... risks of breakdown and ... user habits "I don't mind having to walk to a copier, but I really need a personal printer for..."

It was by taking into consideration these problem that Doxense created Watchdoc printing management software.

Watchdoc responds perfectly to the expectations of companies who wish to rationalize their printing costs. The solution precisely calculates the direct printing costs (toner, paper, ink); but also the indirect costs associated with the availability of the machines, availability of the hotline, for example, productivity, quality, corporate image...

More than a simple program, the solution proposed by Doxense and its network of partners and certified builders, is: a method for optimizing and building an Architecture for Printing Systems.

Here are simple steps to illustrate the measures:

	Count identify the volumes, the types of prints, copies, the times, the places, the availability and the quality of service, for the entire printing infrastructure of the company.
	Analyze and consider the correlation between needs, the uses and the expectations of the users of the print and copy services. The knowledge of the technical, organizational and functional structural constraints, combined with expertise in "printing", will produce: "Target Architecture for Printing Systems".

The ingredients for this construction:

• The alliance between the "Know how" of the Client - Expert Partner
• The Resources, including Watchdoc!
• The catalyst "Manage the Change"

It is therefore through communication, responsibilities, plus management and user behavior, that the investments can be justified.

	Organize by putting into place an adapted architecture, balanced between costs, functions and the services expected by the user
	Make secure with both confidentiality and availability of print services
	Control through measuring the performance obtained in real time and over the period. Optimize the organization of the installation, establish new objectives ...

...and… start over!

Watchdoc permits, on average, a reduction of more than 20% of printing costs, regardless of the size of the company. Economy combined with behavior motivated by ecological considerations , where each page not printed contributes to a better planet

Watchdoc - technical Information.

Watchdoc - technical Information.

Rebuilt in 2003, the Watchdoc product is henceforth based on last technologies: powerful and open platform ".net", "Unicode" allowing an easy and fast linguistic bearing, but also ergonomics, simple to use interface without equivalence today, 100% WEB administration.

Because the performance of a product is not exclusively related to its functionality, the DOXENSE team is completely dedicated to this product, without any other ambition to carry it to the very first rank in the world.

In order to use it with the maximum of benefit, some pre-requisites are essential.

Server Architecture

Watchdoc works along with the Windows spooler.
At the time of the control of a print queue, Watchdoc clone the printer concerned in a "Shadow" (no visible by end users), printer and puts the shared file in pause mode. Thus, Watchdoc analyzes the received spool. This technical choice allows a perfect integration in the Windows environment, without creation of "specific ports" and without modifying the configuration of the user stations: the introduction is immediate and without deterioration of your workstations "master".
If the Network queue is in "Accounting mode", Watchdoc releases the job at the end of the analysis; if the Network queue is in "Validation mode", the print request is "blocked" until the user validate the documents that it really wishes to print.

Its administration or consultation interface are entirely Web based, Internet Explorer 5.5 and above and Mozilla should be used. The releasing interface per smart card, uses an ActiveX control, it is thus only compatible with Internet Explorer 5.5 and above.
Watchdoc stores the statistics and the users Virtual Purse in two databases, using an ODBC driver of the DBMS to connect it.

To function, Watchdoc needs four servers (services), these four servers can be on one or more physical machines: the Web administration part on an Internet Information Server (IIS), its databases on a SQL or MSDE (distributed with the setup) one, the directory should be Active Directory or LDAP, reachable on a domain controller and, the Watchdoc core, on one or more print server. Each component needs to connect with the others, either locally, or via the network.

Click the image to enlarge

Print Server pre-requisites

• Windows 2000 server SP4 or
• Windows 2003 server SP1
  (With the Windows Print Services or UNIX (LPR) working)

Printers languages analysis

• PJL
• PCL : 5e et 6 (PCL-XL)
• HPGL2
• Postscript DSC (Document Structuring Conventions)
• ESC/P 2
• EMF 

Users Directory and databases

Supported for Watchdoc 3.X :
- Active Directory / ADAM
- XML Files
- SQL Table
- Proxy directory: correspondence between number of badge and login user, or between the name seized in the copier and the user login (copies tracking via SNMP),
 
Watchdoc 4.X family products, Directory validation in addition with the preceding ones:
Watchdoc uses dynamical connection to the directory avoiding synchronization with a local copy of the entire list of users, which allows you more security and less maintenance.

• Active Directory
  Supported with necessary validation of the schema
• Open LDAP
• Novell EDirectory 8.6

Supported DataBases Servers :
- MS SQL Server 2000 and above / MSDE / SQL Server Express 2005 Edition
- MySQL
 

Notifications

- E-mail : SMTP protocol
- Popup : « Messages Posting » Microsoft (net send) Service to be activated if necessary

Network Ports

- Watchdoc:

• TCP/UDP 5744 between the Administration Web Server and the Print Server.
• TCP/UDP 5743 between NetPOD and the print server.

- HTTP(S) :

• Between workstations and the Administration Web Server
• TCP 80 (443)

SQL

• Between the Administration Web Server and the Database Server.
• TCP 1433 for MS SQL Server
• TCP 3306 for MySQL

Directory

• Between the Print Server and the AD/LDAP server
• TCP 389 (or 636 SSL) for LDAP, Active Directory or OpenLDAP connection.

SNMP

• Between the Print Server and Printers
• UDP 161

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