2 Million Copies Of HP Printer Driver Downloaded

More than two million copies of HP's Universal Print Driver have been downloaded from the company, allowing users and IT departments to realise time-saving and productivity benefits.

More than two million copies of HP's Universal Print Driver have been downloaded from the company, allowing users and IT departments to realise time-saving and productivity benefits when managing printers.

The HP Universal Print Driver for Windows, which works with virtually all networked HP Laserjet printing devices, is claimed to enable staff to focus on more strategic enterprise issues and projects, reduce the number of calls to help desks and improve productivity for those who print.

The claimed easy-to-use, self-updating driver provides users and IT departments a single, universal print driver to manage.

The driver is said to automatically recognise upgrades to HP devices, so IT personnel do not need to manually update drivers on each device on a network.

The HP Universal Print Driver is also said to eliminate the need to locate and download drivers for remote company offices, since they are already able to print to most HP Laserjet printers, regardless of location.

Vince Ferraro, vice president of worldwide marketing for the Laserjet business at HP, said: "Issues related to printer drivers are daily time-sinks for IT professionals but the HP Universal Print Driver eliminates those headaches by simplifying printing and reducing IT and help desk calls.

As the industry's only truly single universal print driver, the HP UPD allows customers to concentrate on their real business of printing valuable documents." According to Scott Hunt, product line manager at Brigham Young University (USA): "The HP UPD met many of the objectives that we sought out, allowing us to expand easily, providing our customers and consumers with greater flexibility and reducing our support costs." HP has deployed the Universal Print Driver to its employees almost worldwide.

Results from the deployment included a two-week roll-out to more than 100,000 HP employees, a 20 per cent reduction in help desk and printer-related support calls in the first three months and HP said it was able to 'retire' 225 redundant print servers costing approximately US$2,900 per month per server - enabling a savings of US$7.8 million per year.

The company added that 19 IT people gained back up to 45 per cent of personnel's time.

HP also found that changing default settings to duplex printing (double-sided printing) in the HP Universal Print Driver reduced the company's paper usage by 25 per cent and it is expecting to save more than US$6 million and reduce annual paper usage by more than 750 tons, when implemented globally as a standard.

The HP UPD is also claimed to be beneficial to organisations deploying Windows Vista as it enables IT departments to virtually eliminate the need for testing, qualifying and distributing hundreds of different printer drivers when they migrate to Windows Vista.

Jon Reardon, group director of office document technology services at Infotrends, said: "The existence of multiple printer drivers within an organisation can bring a number of challenges for IT personnel, the help desk, the users and the organisation as a whole.

The answer to these challenges would be an implementation of a driver aimed at becoming the 'platform' driver for an organization." He added: "HP appears to understand this need and the attention the company has paid to this area is encouraging." Infotrends published an industry white paper on the HP UPD, titled 'one driver to rule them all: the universal print driver', which said that it should be clear that the driver pays off for organisations in a number of areas.

HP added that the HP Universal Print Driver was recognised by Industry Analysts, Inc, receiving the firm's first technological innovation award.

Industry Analysts is a marketing and management consulting firm specializing in research and training.

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