VHPH Bad Rothenfelde | Secure Education Printing Case Study

Bringing Reliable, Secure Printing to a Childhood Education and Early Intervention Center

In a school, kindergarten, or early intervention setting, printing is not an optional convenience. Children need worksheets, coloring pages, and other paper materials every day, and writing by hand and hands-on creative work remain central to child development even as digital tools spread. When the printers themselves become unreliable, it is the daily routine of teachers and caregivers, and ultimately the children's learning, that suffers.

The Challenge

Before switching to ezeep, staff at VHPH Bad Rothenfelde regularly ran into printing problems that disrupted the daily routine. Printers would sometimes not be found on the network or would suddenly become unreachable, and print jobs would get stuck in the queue without ever printing.

"Before using ezeep, we constantly had problems with printing," says Hendrik Auf der Landwehr, Managing Director at VHPH Bad Rothenfelde. "Printers were sometimes not found, or they suddenly became unreachable. Print jobs would also get stuck in the queue and never print."

For an organization where longer printing outages directly affect the classroom and its early intervention programs, this kind of unpredictability was a real operational risk, not just an inconvenience.

"Printer management is significantly easier, and printers can be used flexibly from different devices without having to set up each one individually. This saves us time on administration and lets us offer our staff a simple and reliable printing solution."

Hendrik Auf der Landwehr

Managing Director,
VHPH Bad Rothenfelde e.V.

The Solution

ezeep now handles printing for the entire organization without requiring a dedicated print server or complex technical configuration. Staff can print flexibly at any available printer, wherever they happen to be working.

"ezeep makes printing significantly easier for all staff at our facility," says Auf der Landwehr. "Everyone can print flexibly at any available printer without needing their own print server or complex technical configuration."

The organization also relies on ezeep's authenticated, pull-based printing to protect confidential information. Print jobs are only released once a staff member authenticates at the device, so documents no longer sit unattended in the output tray. For an education provider handling records for children and families, that authentication step meaningfully reduces the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive material.

"ezeep also enables printing with authentication," Auf der Landwehr explains. "This means print jobs are only released after logging in at the device, which prevents documents from remaining unattended in the output tray. This significantly improves the protection of confidential information and reduces the risk of unauthorized access by unauthorized people."

Before choosing ezeep, the organization weighed three alternatives. Standing up its own print server would have meant centrally managed printer assignments and policies, but with high setup and ongoing maintenance effort, and no built-in support for secure, PIN- or user-authenticated printing. Manually installing every printer on every individual device was another option, but it would have required remote setup for each device and repeating the process whenever printers were added or replaced, all for a permanently high administrative burden and still no secure printing. A third option, printers with built-in PIN release, would have meant replacing most of the existing fleet, since only a small number of models support that function, at a per-device cost in the low four figures plus setup and maintenance. For the organization, none of the three made economic or organizational sense.

"ezeep ultimately convinced us because it works without our own print server, is flexible to use with our existing hardware, and at the same time enables secure printing with authentication," Auf der Landwehr says. "That keeps both the administrative effort and the investment cost low, while still giving us high usability and data security."

The Outcome

Staff no longer lose time to unreachable printers or stuck print jobs, and the IT and administrative burden of managing printing has dropped noticeably. Printers can be used flexibly from different devices without being set up individually for each one, freeing up time that previously went into administration. Authenticated printing also gives the organization a concrete safeguard for confidential documents involving children and families, without the cost of replacing hardware or running a dedicated print server.

Why It Matters

VHPH Bad Rothenfelde represents a scenario common across schools, kindergartens, and other childcare and early intervention providers: printing remains essential to daily operations, budgets and IT staffing are limited, and any records involving children require careful handling. For any education or childcare organization evaluating how to make printing reliable and secure without investing in a print server or new hardware, this case study is a concrete example of that trade-off working out in practice.

About VHPH Bad Rothenfelde

The Verein für heilpädagogische Hilfe Bad Rothenfelde e.V. operates a school, kindergarten, and early intervention (Frühförderung) program for children in Bad Rothenfelde, Germany. The organization supports children's development through hands-on, paper-based learning materials such as worksheets and coloring pages alongside its broader educational and therapeutic programs. Staff across the organization now print through ezeep, using authenticated printing to protect sensitive information about the children and families it serves.

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