ECI Software Solutions offers printer management software for managed print service (MPS) providers. Their Printanista remote device monitoring technology collects critical printing data from an unlimited number of devices.
We only use it to track meters and ink levels. But it's well suited for that as that is the most important thing to track, and the website does it well. As far as when it's less appropriate, I'm not sure, as we use it only when it's needed, and it does its job.
It allows me to gather and organize meter data in relevant and useful ways. It works very well with MS Excel spreadsheets.
It provides complete meter data so that you can provide your Sales dept. with enough useful information so that eventual upgrade proposals can be constructed. It also provides real information that tells how much print volume may or may not have to suggest changes to a customer fleet of printers.
It is also simple enough for customers with smaller printer fleets so that you can isolate certain areas of the meter data that may prove useful in certain applications.
The helpdesk and support is useless. I literally know more about the product than they do.
The onsites and connection to central is unreliable. We have to hire an extra employee just to keep this running.
The programers don't think about or test the patches the push out. Onistes break after they update central
Some machines will show up in the MIB walk but wont actually show up on the device page. Thier solution is to create a new account. They don't have the technical capacity to figure out why it is doing this.
Just a very unreliable product that we have multiple tickets a week open that they seem to never be able to resolve
I prefer Printanista because it can be used industry wide. Some of the other DCA softwares don't seem to care alot about getting data from other makes and models of machines that aren't their own. The Kyocera product I mentioned was called KMNetViewer when I used it, but it seemed to only gather Kyocera information reliably as opposed to other makes. Not useful when you have multiple lines of products that are sold and serviced by this company.
The interface is fairly easy to navigate and figure things out.
It could use improvement for some Xerox devices, as it lists some models as " . " instead of the model name.
This has saved us tens of thousands per year instead of sending techs to collect meters.
The latest version of this product allows you to access the interface of the device, from the cloud dashboard instead of having to remote on to a user's workstation and then get to the device. This is cutting-edge technology without a doubt.
