I agree with your assessment about not being able to stop people from
printing but I can state with conviction that I am still going to be asked
if this is even possible. We do not charge departments for their printing
and no one but a couple of executives have personal printers attached.
Everyone else uses the network printers. But, no one will ever have a
department charge leveled against them for using the printers. That was
discussed briefly once upon a time and was soundly trounced before it even
got any teeth behind it. So, is this possible or not using Outlook (and not
relying on everyone to alter their Signatures) or through a GPO or some
other means....??
Thanks for your Reply - it really is appreciated.
Jon
An IT department that gets a fixed cost allocation without regard to how
those services are used by various departments is setup to be abused
without recompense from the worst offender. It sounds like the worst
offender has the loudest voice to hide and circumvent their
responsibilities.
Nothing says you cannot generate a report of paper usage based on the
logs from the network printers and publish them. Nuisance the managers
of the worst offending departments.
Disclaimers are usually only appended to e-mails where the target is an
outsider. That is, the disclaimer gets added when the e-mail goes to a
recipient outside the company. There's no point in using the disclaimer
for e-mails between employees. They are already held responsible to
comply with established company policies. It is highly likely their
signature attests to their consent to agree. Of course, disclaimers
will interfere with digitally signed e-mails since they alter the
content of the message after when the hash was generated as part of the
digital signature. Using disclaimers obviates sending digitally signed
e-mails. None of your customers require your e-mails be digitally
signed so they get some confidence those messages were from your
company?
Since you are asking about how to modify the contents of messages but do
so at the mail server, and since this newsgroup discusses an e-mail
client, you need to go ask the admins of mail servers. If using
Exchange, there are Exchange newsgroups. I'm pretty sure if you were
using sendmail that you can execute a script that would modify a message
before sending it.
So is whomever pushing this stupidity (of appending a "do not print
unless necessary" signature onto all outbound e-mails) also the same one
that thinks putting "For company use only" on the supply cabinets will
prevent parents from pilfering school supplies in the fall when school
starts from the company's cabinets? Putting a video camera at the
supply cabinets (which are exposed to any employee's access) with a sign
"For company use only - You are under surveillance" would work much
better. That's why I mention pushing a log of paper usage at the
managers to let them and their employees know that their paper usage
*is* being monitored. Which slows speeders better: a sign that posts
the speed limit, or a police car sitting alongside the road with a radar
cone sticking out the side window? Asking them doesn't work as well as
letting them know you are watching them.
Obviously this request started because someone was disturbed by the
consumption of printer paper at the company. Yet they don't care WHO is
using all that paper? Does your company require drug testing? If not,
they might want to start if this is the kind of logic being perpetrated
at the company to waste resources with no effect.
