All faculty, staff and students have access to high-speed, multi-function print, copy and scan devices distributed throughout the Ross facilities. Some of these devices located in the faculty and department office areas also have network fax capability.
"Follow You" Printing: A Virtual Print Queue
Ross public printers use a technology called "Follow You" printing (sometimes stylized as FollowU). Instead of having to guess which printer might be available when you need to print something important, you always print to a single, generic printer. You never print to a physical printer that might currently have a line of people waiting to print, or might be out of paper, etc. You print to a virtual, "Follow You" printer that can be located anywhere within the Ross facilities. Your print job(s) will be stored for several hours while you complete your work. When you are ready to print, walk up to any of our Xerox devices, swipe your MCard to let the device know who you are, and select the jobs you want to print (all or only a few). The underlying printer management system then locates your print job(s) from the virtual queue, moves them to the printer at which you are standing, and releases them for printing immediately.
Secure and Confidential Printing
A benefit of "Follow You" printing is that it provides very secure and confidential printing options. With traditional public and departmental printers, jobs are submitted to a specific printer (through a "queue") and printed near immediately, leaving the pages waiting to be picked up on the tray for anyone to read. "Follow You" printing holds the job until you swipe your University MCard (or type your UM login credentials on the keypad) at the device to identify that the job belongs to you. Only after this secure authentication is the job released for printing.
Faculty and staff also have the option to print a document to a printer through the use of a security code (4-digit PIN). In this case, you can assign a PIN to the job before you send it to a specific device. When you are ready to print at the device, simply select your job, and enter the associated PIN that you assigned earlier.
Do's and Don'ts
Printers are a community resource, so please treat them as such and be courteous to others who use them, and be mindful of the business school's commitment to sustainability by reducing your paper use as much as possible.
- Use double-sided printing (the default) as much as possible
- Do not print documents you know you won't use, or which can just as easily be used online; try to use Cloud storage services instead
- If you print a job, remove it from the tray when you are finished; don't leave unwanted copies for others to throw away.
- Split up large or complex jobs into smaller sections to allow others equal access to the printers... in other words, please don't print four copies of a 500-page job at one time
- Do not manually feed your own paper into any printer (especially transparencies) as this may damage the printer and limit access to others
- Make sure you log out when you are done; this is important for the security of your documents and for the next person's convenience
Faculty/Staff Local Desktop and Department Printers
"Follow You" printing is available throughout the Ross complex. Taking advantage of these devices reduces the number and diverse type of personal and department printers. As you consider printing options in your area, please consider adopting "Follow You" printing and help reduce the overall cost of printing within Ross. You will also help improve our overall "green computing" and reduce our environmental footprint. "Follow You" offers the best in print quality, printing options, economical printing and security.
How much more cost effective is "Follow You" printing compared to a local laser or inkjet printer in your office? Pretty significant. The document samples above demonstrate various levels of toner or ink coverage. Your cost to print a typical sheet of paper with 10%, 30% and 60% coverage comes to 6-10 cents, 14-30 cents and 30-60 cents, respectively. Higher coverage can exceed one dollar per page! This does not include the cost of the paper or any depreciation on the cost of the original equipment.
Black & White and Color Printing on all "Follow You" Printers
Every "Follow You" printer can operate with black & white (b/w) and color documents. There is a significantly higher charge associated with printing color pages. A color page is defined as any page printed with a single dot of color. Every document will be printed as b/w by default unless you specifically change the print method on the device. When you print in color, only those pages that have color, defined as a single dot, will be charged the color rate.
Note: Macintosh computers print color as default. You must select the "Force Monochrome" option on the device to print in b/w.
Printer Allocations and Costs
Ross students are provided with a printing allocation every August 1 to cover the entire academic year. Non-Ross students are given a smaller allocation. Charges apply to printing and copying. Scanning documents is not charged against your allocation to encourage more "green" use of resources.
The student allocation of $120 is designed to cover 2,000 pages of b/w printing for the entire year. The number of pages will decrease the more you print in color because of the higher per page costs. Your allocation does not roll over from year to year. The $120 is a rate of exchange within the print management system, only covers Ross printing, and is not a real currency. You are only charged for documents that you release from the "Follow You" printer. This allocation was decided after a two-year study to determine student-printing needs to cover academics. It is not meant to cover the needs of clubs or any outside activities. The study showed that 92% of student printing was covered with an allocation of 1,600 b/w pages. The allocation was increased to 2,000 b/w pages in order to cover the occasional printer jam, toner imperfection, misprint or accidental print. Please print carefully.
If you use up your printing allocation, you can continue to print at Ross if you agree to pay for printing. If you agree, we will activate a buffer good for 200 b/w pages on your account. When you run out of your 2000 pages, you can use the 200 page buffer to continue printing. Because we cannot offer refunds, once you start using the buffer to print, you only need to pay for the printing you have already received to replenish the buffer.
Students, you can check your printing balance using the link in the side-bar, located on the upper right of this page.
Faculty and staff are not given an actual printing allocation, but printing activity is tracked and monitored to make sure that printing resources are used responsibly for academic or business purposes only.
Printing at ITS Sites
Members of the UM community also receive a printing allocation each semester from ITS to cover black and white printing services in other campus computing sites. The pages printed to ITS printers in these locations are deducted from the ITS page allocation, which is separate from your Ross allocation. Information on ITS printing services can be found on 
ITS Sites web page.
| Printers | Black & White Pages Per Term | Cost Per Additional Page |
|---|---|---|
| Ross printers | 2000 pages |
$0.06 cents/page for black & white $.40 cents/page for color |
| ITS printers | 400 pages |
$0.06/page; see ITS Sites for latest costs
|
| Total per semester: | 2400 pages for Ross School of Business students | |