Print Quotas

[ICT_GUY]

Anyone know of good software to manage print quotas?

Two teachers and one class have got through 50% of our colour laser printers carts over a two day period. Approx £50 of printing.

£15 for a serries of pics that kids help up in an assembly.
£20 for a certificate from bbc dance mat typing for each of the children.
£15 for a booklet that should have been photo copied.

I would like to find a way to restrict class and user printing. So that if 10 colour prints from a class go through then they have to come to me and ask for more.

Certainly I want to restrict the number of prints a user can make in a period of time.

Free would be good, though I would spend for a good app, upto £100. ops: Tight I am.

[mrforgetful]

There are a few good apps but you'll struggle for that money.

The majority of people here I think use either Print Manager Plus or Papercut.

Papercut is cheaper and a one off payment, not sure about PMP as I've not used it for years.

[localzuk]

Take a look at this. It is based on Linux, CUPS and Pykota - all of which are free.

If you don't have a linux server of any type, you could run it on an existing box via VMWare (http://www.vmware.com).

[ICT_GUY]

Ok thanks for the info.

I will be putting it to the Head at some point. The linux box might be fun as I have a few old PCs hanging around.

Spend money to save money

[dhicks]

> Anyone know of good software to manage print quotas?

I've set up a system for our network where users print to the free PDF Creator print-to-PDF printer driver, then have the PDF from that passed to a Perl script. This Perl script can do anything you like - ask the user which printer they want to send the document to, check the user has suffcient credit to print to a particular printer, or skip the printing step entirley and email a teacher with the PDF or drop it into a Moodle course directory. I need to get this working /properly/ before I network the wide-format Epson printers that print to £25-a-time photo paper reels!

--
David Hicks

[ICT_GUY]

Now thats set me thinking, certainly saving a pdf copy would be nice.

I noticed papercut do a free print logger, this seems to pretty cool as it logs everything to excel frienly file. This would give me access to a top 5 heavy users on the colour printer which just might scare them into not printing out tones of rubbish at £1 per page.

[amcevoy]

Backup your print server before installing printlogger. It killed ours after a conflict with the Oki LPR utility But now we have a much smoother running print server (fresh install) and are demoing Papercut. Its good, but I can't set filters to differenciate enough between users. I am probably going to go back to just the printlogger. Export the files from it and use SQL to generate bills for people.

Adam

[boomam]

I highly recommend Papercut.
Ive never had any problems with it here. .

[Geoff]

Using PyKota here. Also have a PDF printer setup via the same system as well.

[elsiegee40]

We use Print Manager Plus and have been seriously tightening the rules. The head has taken ownership of the changes, fortunately.

One of the most dramatic reductions has been achieved by blocking print jobs with http in the title. Everyone now has to copy and paste the bit they want into a Saved word document (Document1, etc also banned) before printing. It's really making everyone think!

We've also tightened up what can be printed using the Photo Print wizard - The largest photo size that is accepted in 1/4 page A4.

The staff have taken it remarkably well so far. I'm expecting trouble after Christmas.

[lasercat]

A vote for Papercut here.

The release station feature is cool, nice web based thing teachers or techies can use to filter out silly documents.

Nice that they give you a fully functioning 40 day trial.