Name badge software and hardware has made tremendous progress in the past ten years. While in the past, printing on plastic ID cards was the domain of the banks, it has now moved to mainstream thanks to the development of the name badge printing software and plastic card printers. The software and hardware combinations are becoming inexpensive enough to be within the reach of small businesses.
In this article we will discuss three levels of sophistication of name badge systems. You should be able to determine what level of name badge software is suitable for your ID badge printing needs. Since the three versions of ID software are priced at completely different pricing levels, you stand to save a lot or money by purchasing exactly the right type of ID card software to fit your needs. The levels of name badge software are: Individual badge printing, batch printing, and networked printing.
Name badge software for printing individual plastic ID cards
When you just need to print a single name badge at the time, for instance, when a driver comes to the DMV to get their drivers license, or when a student enrolling into the University system gets his enrollment papers, then all you really need is the simplest version of the name badge software. With it, you will take the picture of the person, import the data about the person, the picture, and possibly the signature of the person into the pre-designed template, and send the card design out for printing of the card. Simple and effective, yet not suitable for larger print jobs.
ID badge printing software to print batches of ID cards
When your task is to combine the data of numerous individuals, their images, and print them out all at the same time, such as for attendees of a conference, or for the new recruits into the military, then you need ID badge printing software and name badge maker that can handle larger numbers of ID cards at the time. The software like that will be more expensive as it will involve its own database of entries. The name badge printers will normally need to include sufficiently large feeders to allow for unattended, multi ID badge print jobs. You can find in the marketplace the plastic ID card printers with the minimum of 100 plastic ID cards capacity to over 500 plastic ID cards capacity.
Networked software for name badge printing in large, networked organizations
The advantage of a large, networked organization is that its costly resources can be shared. Such is the case with the name badge software and name badge printers as well. When a group of ID badge printers is shared across the organization, it requires software that can access company-wide databases of individuals, such as employees or visitors, and combine that information and print ID badges over the network. Name badge software will have to know how to talk to a variety of company databases over the intranet or securely over the internet. Such functionality does come at an extra price, however.
