FM Audit and other USB discovery devices

I may be opening a can of worms here but I got a call from Polek&Polek. I can't remember which one they have but whichever one they have, they were willing to send me one for 30 days no risk/no cost. I don't know if that offer is open to anyone or just people who do business with them.

I've had the opportunity to use FM Audit. While it is nice to have the info collected it doesn't take the place of a true site survey. It does and has missed printers. But that could be because it is an appliance that you really need to have a good handle on to use.

We have been using Print Audit "Print Key" and it works great. Plug it in, provide the IP Range for what devices you want scanned (most IT support people know this off the top of their heads) and then let the "Key" search. With in just a minute or two the results are downloaded to the key and you return to the office. At the office you can get some nice reporting informatation on the environment and then position your offering.

FYI - we aren't using it as much as I would like, but where we have used it it has been great!

I have used FM Audit, Print Audit and @Remote. Neal is right but I think we have spoken about that before.

My results have been a bit better with FM Audit than Ricoh's lab testing but I spoke to Mark Pollack (sp?) about the FM Audit test and he told me it consistently missed 60% of the printers on the LAN network.

They all have their quirks and they all only give you volumes - not costs. I need good data gathering tools as I do about 12 assessments a month now. I couldn't find anything adequate so I started developing my own!

All of the technology's out there are of a "pinging" like nature - let me ping each ip address and see if something comes back. IF it does, let me apply SNMP logic to it and see if I can understand it or it looks like a printer. IF so, let me record what data it sent back and move onto the next. That is why they all stink- IT is almost like looking for a needle in a hay stack.

Instead - we are developing a tool that monitors the network looking for the right SNMP traffic which is real-time and proactive not passive and hit or miss.

In the meantime, 2Remote is a great product and since it is branded by Ricoh- offers quite a bit of uniqueness. However- be aware that all the data does go to Ricoh Servers and you get it after that. IF you are concerned about what Ricoh may do knowing your client name- just put a code number in as account name or something else that you can tell what client it is and Ricoh Corp will have no way of knowing anything about who your client is.

We’ve used FM Audit at several locations to capture monthly print volume. I used it under ITs’ supervision of course. It’s a very useful tool. It won’t capture printers connected directly to PCs but, most of them are very low volume anyway. As for cost analysis, you can export to excel and plug in the cost per page for each model printer. Giving you the monthly or yearly cost. A very good tool for sales and cost justification.

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Originally posted by Solutions Guru:
IF you are concerned about what Ricoh may do knowing your client name- just put a code number in as account name or something else that you can tell what client it is and Ricoh Corp will have no way of knowing anything about who your client is.

Well... Not exactly. IP addresses are registered to companies, so when the data is sent, I can find the name of the owner of those IP addresses and determine their geographic location (at least to the city level).

If the fact that Ricoh has this information concerns you, then you should still be concerned.