Email --> Print

[zag]

Shared printers have annoyed me since the dawn of time, I think we have around 35 in our school and its a constant battle to keep them reliable.

 

So I was wondering if there is a simple printer that will work via email submission?

 

Basically a student would email the office document as an attachment to something like [email protected] and it would print automatically.

 

Has anyone done this?

[BKGarry]

There are various solutions for this, we can achieve this with safecom (which we use for pull printing) which you can purchase a module which allows you to email and then go pick it up by the card. But I have never had a problem with shared printers. We have 2 printer queues on our server, one for mono and one for colour. Also 35 printers seems a bit excessive. Although we are at the other extreme. With just under 1000 students and around 170 staff we have 8 pull print enables MFPs and 5 admin/SLT office printers.

[zag]

I'm still really confused if this is possible, anything would be good, even a web upload form.

 

Looking at safecom it looks very similar to papercut (which we already have) and I don't think its possible from that.

 

I found this but it looks incredibly complicated

 

http://www.papercut.com/tour/web-print/

Edited January 22, 2014 by zag

[BKGarry]

you can email to safecom and it prints, with follow me printing, it is their "Mobile Print Solution"

[fiza]

I'm still really confused if this is possible, anything would be good, even a web upload form.

 

Looking at safecom it looks very similar to papercut (which we already have) and I don't think its possible from that.

 

I found this but it looks incredibly complicated

 

Tour - Web Print (Mobile Printing) - PaperCut

@zag - I am trialling papercut at the moment and have looked at the web print. From what I inderstand you need to set up one machine that will do all the web printing. It has to have a pdf reader and office installed. It will then open and print any documents sent to it (obviously only works with pdf and office docs). Students/staff upload their documents using the papercut web interface to the web print url that you set up. When they login they can then print their documents. I don't think it automatically prints things.

[zag]

Yeh I've just bought the latest version of papercut, I'll try that.

 

Apparently Google cloud print can do this, but we use Office 365 at the moment so that wouldn't really work.

[fiza]

Yeh I've just bought the latest version of papercut, I'll try that.

 

Apparently Google cloud print can do this, but we use Office 365 at the moment so that wouldn't really work.

 

Papercut has a facility to implement Google cloud print in the latest version. Not something I have looked at though.

 

edit: Sorry just noticed the Office365 bit so Google cloud print is not an option.

Edited January 22, 2014 by fiza

[MatthewL]

PaperCut is good but there is a piece of software worth looking at called EveryonePrint which will do what you want too. If you have any queries feel free to ask. Just finished an install of it for web printing this afternoon and will be doing email print at a later date for the customer.

[mac_shinobi]

@zag - I am trialling papercut at the moment and have looked at the web print. From what I inderstand you need to set up one machine that will do all the web printing. It has to have a pdf reader and office installed. It will then open and print any documents sent to it (obviously only works with pdf and office docs). Students/staff upload their documents using the papercut web interface to the web print url that you set up. When they login they can then print their documents. I don't think it automatically prints things.

 

Would that work for other documents if you used a PDF Writer such as Cute PDF / PDF Creator etc, from another application ( file --> Print --> select the pdf writer ( cute pdf or whatever ) --> save the document as a pdf and then email that to whatever email address to print it off )

[zag]

PaperCut is good but there is a piece of software worth looking at called EveryonePrint which will do what you want too. If you have any queries feel free to ask. Just finished an install of it for web printing this afternoon and will be doing email print at a later date for the customer.

 

Perfect! Looks like thats the software i'm looking for!

 

How are you finding it? How much did it cost?

[sparkeh]

Latest version of PaperCut (v14 released yesterday) has email -> print implemented.

From reading the release notes it appears every print queue has an email address you can send stuff to.

 

Not upgraded yet but happy to report back when its done.

[nadeem]

We use EveryonePrint for this - allows email print, web upload print, and even for people to set up their own driver to print to our printers (we use Equitrac)

[sparkeh]

Just an update.

Been trying to get Google Cloud Printing working with PaperCut. Unfortunately, at this time, it doesn't have proxy support which makes it pretty useless for us.

Support have told me that the GCP feature is being actively developed but couldn't give me planned features or timescales.

[zag]

I finally got Papercut to web print today, works really well for Excel, Word, Powerpoint and PDF documents.

 

Really happy with this is it also gives a nice fallback when printers dont connect.

 

No more drivers or configuration, it just works! hurray!

[zag]

I also got Email to Print working but its of little use at the moment as it only seems to work with PDF documents.

 

When they get that working for Office docs it will become very useful!