MatthewL Posted May 27, 2014 Posted May 27, 2014 Those of you who use PaperCut and have moved to it from using nothing can you list me a few benefits please? i.e. Centralised reporting, centralised access control to MFD's Just putting a few notes together to try and convince someone to spend the money and get PaperCut, I know its right but they need something to show it is for them. I use it everyday from an install point of view but need something from end users. Thanks
timbo343 Posted May 27, 2014 Posted May 27, 2014 (edited) Reporting, centralised management, its very flexible, quotaing. Thats a few of my pluses. Allows users to view their own usages. Puts a footer on the bottom of pages to show who, when, where a document was printed (only works on pcl drivers) Edited May 27, 2014 by timbo343
william_tropico Posted May 27, 2014 Posted May 27, 2014 Simple user authentication with AD. Easy to create reports for SMT/department heads. Job logging that users can view. Shared billing accounts. Scripting / printer filters. Also cheaper then our old program. Really shown us how much paper we get through and now it's so much easier to show people what they have printed and make them more aware of printing and the costs involved. William
mdench Posted May 27, 2014 Posted May 27, 2014 To be honest of the all over and that it integrates really well with BioStore Biometrics if you happen to have that which we use it in conjunction with our MFD's and follow me printing queues. One of the things that we are now playing with with the growth of BYOD is the use of the google cloud printing service meaning our users can print from any mobile device if they have the gmail / drive app installed it or if they have the client installed on their laptop. This seems to work well if you have a Google Apps Setup. If you don't then make sure you play around with the Web Print features allowing students to upload work to the print server and then choose the copier on which it is printed. Works really well for our Sixth Form Students meaning they aren't limited by the fact they are using their own devices and not connected to the domain.
IGB Posted June 5, 2014 Posted June 5, 2014 Costs, cost, costs. Everything these days comes down to the green stuff. We have seen a dramatic reduction on the amount of printing that is now done as we set restrictive balances on students, staff have to charge their printing costs to their departments or not print at all, whereas in the past they would just get into an IT suite early morning and print off 300 copies of the days teaching resources therefore hiding the printing costs to another department. Whilst we don't charge any students for printing, they do have a starting balance and they can get printing vouchers from their teachers and we can also set users to not be able to accumulate funds higher than a set level. This alone has seen a HUGE reduction in the thousands of pictures of donkeys etc pouring out of printers. The ability to now charge each department for their printing costs has been quite good as well as our head of departments/budget holders have now taken a more responsible approach to their printing costs, some even only giving small allowances to their staff to print from. The Follow Me printing which allows users to release at any of our MFD's I thought was going to be the biggest selling point, however we've had in the past nothing but moans about it.
DGardiner Posted June 5, 2014 Posted June 5, 2014 Just putting it inplace and using the desktop client to notify users of their usage and the use of print release using the rfid tag in their idcards has pretty much eliminated wastage. from bills of 2000+ to £3-400 per quarter.
kingoranks Posted June 5, 2014 Posted June 5, 2014 Hi All, We are having this installed soon, so excited and looking forward to it. Can anyone tell me about the installation process?was it smooth?We are going with Annodata.I have some fuzzy end user to deal with soon lol
Edu-IT Posted June 5, 2014 Posted June 5, 2014 Hi All, We are having this installed soon, so excited and looking forward to it. Can anyone tell me about the installation process?was it smooth?We are going with Annodata.I have some fuzzy end user to deal with soon lol Relatively simple. Just think about how exactly you want printing controlled in advanced with SLT agreement. Shared accounts, print quota etc. 1
MatthewL Posted June 5, 2014 Author Posted June 5, 2014 Cheers for that guys. @kingoranks - with Sharp kit which is all I have installed it with its quite simple. All I will say is have your IP's and queue names ready in Excel or even better install the printers, if you are using shared accounts get a list together of who needs to have access to what account, you can also have sub accounts and these can be locked down to just those that need them, decide who needs admin access to the console and which part i.e. business manager may only require access to reporting where as librarian may need to add credits etc. Decide on what limits are going to who, what you want to charge for each print depending on printer type i.e. desktop v MFD, bear in mind the cost of paper, electricity and any leases plus cost per copy, if you are using it for charging take a look at the PaperCut support site with regards to deploying the client to each PC via the MSI file and make sure if starts on login other wise print jobs wont get to the printer!! Know where in AD you users are you want to import if you are part of a large AD forest or you dont want to import all your users, easiest way to do this is to have a security group with them all in and just do the sync based on that. If you are having follow me printing decide what you want your queue to be called, FollowMePrint is what I normally use but you can call it what you want i.e. Homer, Fred, The Printer, Pluto etc. If you have confidential jobs that are processed there is also a setting that can be changed to hide the job names in the print queue in windows and the only way to see these are when you release the jobs at the device or if you go into the release section of PaperCut. Decide how long you are going to keep the jobs for in the follow me queue before they are delete, normally go for 3 days as it covers the weekend period, this will be entered as 4320, finally decide on your device names as once you have it running and a nice set of figures its not nice to rename devices without messing it all up. Hope that helps, any questions feel free to ask. 1
ass17 Posted June 5, 2014 Posted June 5, 2014 One of the only softwares that reports job print 100% accurately. Most print management record jobs as they hit the spooler and doesn't care if it actually prints or not. Papercut talks direct to the printer to check if the job has been printed. 1
agarabaghi Posted June 10, 2014 Posted June 10, 2014 All the pros are right on from what we seen. What we have seen is a backlash from faculty who do not like to swipe their cards to print (which we resolved by setting some up to direct print while still using paper cut) but they still complain about having to swipe a card to log in to make copies... I hope they just learn to keep their ID cards on them at all time as the policy in the handbook states. Overall we love it... Anyone wanna compare stats? System uptime 10d 13h Users 5,743 Printers 70 Devices 66 Recent errors 0 Recent warnings 7 Total pages 715,111 Pages today 2,500 Hold/release jobs 11 Active user clients 345
DGardiner Posted June 10, 2014 Posted June 10, 2014 All the pros are right on from what we seen. What we have seen is a backlash from faculty who do not like to swipe their cards to print (which we resolved by setting some up to direct print while still using paper cut) but they still complain about having to swipe a card to log in to make copies... I hope they just learn to keep their ID cards on them at all time as the policy in the handbook states. Overall we love it... Anyone wanna compare stats? System uptime 10d 13h Users 5,743 Printers 70 Devices 66 Recent errors 0 Recent warnings 7 Total pages 715,111 Pages today 2,500 Hold/release jobs 11 Active user clients 345 wow, yours is massive compared to ours :v, we don't allow kids to print here though so our user count is just staff [TABLE=class: system-status, width: 246] [TR] [TD=class: icon][/TD] [TD]System uptime[/TD] [TD=class: value]2h 28m[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: icon][/TD] [TD]Users[/TD] [TD=class: value]134[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: icon][/TD] [TD]Printers[/TD] [TD=class: value]9[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: icon][/TD] [TD]Devices[/TD] [TD=class: value]3[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: icon][/TD] [TD]Recent errors[/TD] [TD=class: value]0[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: icon][/TD] [TD]Recent warnings[/TD] [TD=class: value]4[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: icon][/TD] [TD]Total pages[/TD] [TD=class: value]846,109[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: icon][/TD] [TD]Pages today[/TD] [TD=class: value]4,536[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: icon][/TD] [TD]Hold/release jobs[/TD] [TD=class: value]21[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: icon][/TD] [TD]Active user clients[/TD] [TD=class: value]49[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD=class: icon][/TD] [TD]Total Google Cloud Print jobs[/TD] [TD=class: value]20[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE]
agarabaghi Posted June 10, 2014 Posted June 10, 2014 Your 134 users SURE print a lot! Students aren't in right now, so I'm kinda interested to see how the stats change
DGardiner Posted June 10, 2014 Posted June 10, 2014 Your 134 users SURE print a lot! Students aren't in right now, so I'm kinda interested to see how the stats change just a bit, this is 2 schools though! and has been running since jan 2013 the thing what really really got ours in line was automating summary reports to the SLT so they have something to look at, we don't give them an allowance though - but the copiers have their costs set at the approx cost of the print/paper which then gives an accurate cost on the summaries for the SLT to easily have a cost to read against everyones name - it didn't make me popular but then again neither did forcing them to print release everything with an rfid tag in their ID cards :v - i had the same backlash about that initially but they learned to deal with it and have since learned it means you don't have to wait in a queue to get your stuff because someone else beat you to pressing print with 500 pages of nothing. Im about ready to give them Google Cloud Print, got it up and running this morning!
agarabaghi Posted June 10, 2014 Posted June 10, 2014 when benefits do you see from google cloud print? The paper cut web print is a bit iffy... we can't get pdf to work using sandbox. Office files work fine, anything with using adobe reader errors out, removed adobe reader and tried using just the default and still nothing.
DGardiner Posted June 10, 2014 Posted June 10, 2014 when benefits do you see from google cloud print? The paper cut web print is a bit iffy... we can't get pdf to work using sandbox. Office files work fine, anything with using adobe reader errors out, removed adobe reader and tried using just the default and still nothing. All our email and stuff is on GoogleApps so its easy enough to just turn on and let them have it - its more a convenience thing to be honest - it will allow them to prep at home and print everything ready to be released in the morning when they get to work. using https://tools.google.com/dlpage/cloudprintdriver you can print from any windows program and if you log into chrome it will pickup your printers for anything in browser I Have explained it is provided as is and to the best of my ability it will work, but I'm not supporting it... So if you come in and your prep is gone not my problem! i only have paper cut 13.5(upgrade support ran out in jan) and am trying to find out how i go about renewing it from my provider but its been a pain getting ahold of my account manager. so the version i have only just got cloud print so I'm sure there are gonna be some problems. I have sent a few teachers home with 'Homework' to test it out and we will see what happens
agarabaghi Posted June 10, 2014 Posted June 10, 2014 For some reason we still fax here, and that has been our final issue to resolve.
DGardiner Posted June 10, 2014 Posted June 10, 2014 For some reason we still fax here, and that has been our final issue to resolve. yeah, we have a fax in each school - i wish they would go away too...
clockend25 Posted June 10, 2014 Posted June 10, 2014 If you're moving over from a largely unrestricted print environment then you need to make sure changes in terms of quotas, restrictions, budgeting are backed by SLT. We've had it here for three years and print usage continues to rise purely because any attempt to control it results in whinges and subsequently a bottle job from senior management.
clockend25 Posted June 10, 2014 Posted June 10, 2014 System Uptime: 28d 1h Users: 1,102 Printers: 25 Devices: 9 Recent Errors: 0 Recent Warnings: 5 Total Pages: 4,659,581 Pages Today: 8,960 Hold/Release Jobs: 6 Active User Clients: 50 Boom!
clareq Posted June 10, 2014 Posted June 10, 2014 System Status System uptime 27d 5h Users2,336 Printers 213 Recent errors 0 Recent warnings 1 Total Pages 2,709,764 Pages today 5,422 Hold/release jobs 0 Active user clients 116
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