WEPA (pronounced "wee-pah") is a cloud-based printing service, meaning that it is available anywhere you have an Internet connection. Send your project to print, and choose WEPA as the printer, and the print job will be stored on WEPA's servers, ready to print out from any WEPA kiosk you visit.

The service is available to anyone with a NetID and CatCard who is currently associated with the University, including current students, employees and department-sponsored visitors.

Joel Hauff, interim director of the Arizona Student Unions, sees WEPA as a service to help the increasingly mobile University community meet its printing needs. He has arranged for nine WEPA printing kiosks to be installed on the UA main campus as a pilot project.

WEPA representatives are on campus to promote the new service this week. They will be located on the UA Mall and at Fast Copy to assist users with loading the print drivers (available at sitelicense.arizona.edu) on their laptops and understanding how to use the kiosks. The first 1,000 visitors will receive a 50-cent gift card for printing at a WEPA kiosk, and all visitors will be entered into a drawing for a Droid tablet.

Prints can be color or black-and-white and payment can be made with CatCards. Black-and-white prints are 10 cents per page, and color prints are $1 per page.

Once a user has installed the print driver, WEPA will show up as a printer option. Users will be asked for their NetID and password and their print jobs will be stored in their personal accounts on the WEPA print cloud.

Users then visit a WEPA kiosk, swipe their CatCard, select the files to print and pick them up. Or the prints can be paid for using Visa, MasterCard or American Express cards, for an additional 40-cent transaction fee. The kiosks also allow customers to use flash drives to upload documents and print.

The nine kiosks in the WEPA pilot project will be at the following locations (click here for a map):

• Inside the Student Union Memorial Center outside Fast Copy
• In Wilbur's Underground computer lab
• At the Park Student Union
• McClelland Hall’s Sands Computing Lab
• In these five Office of Student Computing Resources lab locations: Campus Recreation Center, McClelland Park, Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Multimedia Learning Lab in the Music building. 

IT Manager Mike Clancy from the Office of Student Computing Resources is looking forward to having the service in OSCR labs.

"This is an opportunity to add color printing to more of our locations and to have the dedicated printer support that comes with WEPA," he said.

Hauff added, "We believe students are living in a world where they are used to doing everything anywhere they want – sitting in class, sitting on the mall, in the Union, at their dorm or apartment, at their job site. This will give them the option of working anywhere, sending the job and then swinging by and picking it up where it is most convenient for them when they hit the campus environment."

If the pilot program is successful, 50 to 60 machines will be installed across campus and on branch campus locations, Hauff said.

To learn more about loading money on CatCards, visit catcash.arizona.edu.