DocuPro vs Papercut vs PCounter

[timbo343]

At the moment we are possibly looking at moving away from papercut (not my choice) but I was wondering if anyone has heard of/used DocuPro.

 

I know Pcounter used to be market leader but I heard a few years ago that Papercut had over taken them however ive never heard anything about DocuPro.

 

Would someone please enlighten me how good/bad docupro is compared to papercut.

[tmcd35]

We use DocuPro here, it's part of the Konica Minolta managed service solution. Compared to Papercut? it's a different beast. Personally I prefer Papercut, if it wasn't for the managed service it wouldn't be my first choice. It's application based rather than web based. It has a built in reporting feature that reports print jobs by users, groups, and costcenters. There's no reporting for printers themselves, instead you have to interrogate the DocuPro's print logs for each device.

[timbo343]

Thanks for the feed back.

 

Does that mean that users cannot see their accounts and see what they have printed? It seems to me that DocuPro is a half attempt to papercut with limited features. Does DocuPro have to be installed on all PCs to integrate the MFPs?

 

So DocuPro doesn't actually manage the MFPs? What about print release? Does DocuPro work on the basis of allowing specific groups to print in colour? How are filters defined so as if staff wanted to print large documents it would be sent to another device?

 

Is DocuPro just a bit of software for reporting?

[PeterH]

Users can't see a history of what they have printed but can see their current account balance and any jobs they have submitted but not printed.

 

Docupro is installed on the server, in our case its on our print server. There is a small client that you can install on the PCs. It puts an icon down in the system tray so users can see outstanding jobs and current balance and can also cancel outstanding jobs.

 

DocuPro does manage the MFDs if they have the DocuPro OpenAPI software on them. Yes it does print release, you can submit a job to a central queue and then print from anywhere. Also handles scan and copy. You can set an age limit for print jobs, so the queue doesn't get filled up with unprinted jobs.

 

You can also get DocuPro to manage ordinary desktop lasers, and it will do accounting but not print release

 

You can create groups in DocuPro based on OUs in AD. Once you have those groups you can impose restrictions such as colour/mono, max number of pages, enforce double-sided etc. And you can set prices for printing and there's a scheduler which allows you to automatically top up account balances if you want to.

 

As far as routing large documents to different devices, I have a feeling it can but not 100% sure as we don't do that. Our Docupro installation is a few years old now, so newer versions might be a bit different.

[timbo343]

Will docupro look at AD groups rather than OUs? We have groups in AD which are departmental. Papercut sees these groups so would be able add people to thee groups rather than having 2 seperate systems (AD and DocuPro) which means less management.

[tmcd35]

I think I asked Konica this, for the same reasons, when they installed the system. Just double checked our install, Departments are linked to OU, then there's Cost Centers which sit entirely within DocuPro. Unfortunately, no it doesn't link to AD groups.

 

It's a very different beast to Papercut. More database/spreadsheet oriented than clean website frontend.

[Big_Ted]

Grab the demo of the others and compare would be the best option. What prompted the possible move from papercut?

[timbo343]

Companies saying they wont support papercut with their MFD solution so if something goes wrong they will blame the software and the software will blame the hardware.

[localzuk]

I'd be looking at different suppliers to be honest! I've had a supplier that actually provided PaperCut, and another that didn't supply it but were happy to work with it on the machines - just with the proviso that support for the software would have to be provided by someone else.

 

Never caused us any issues though!

[timbo343]

What we are wanting to do is this:

 

In reprographics at the moment, the repro user has a folder full of codes which are based in the following format:

0001 – Joe – Art

0002 – Joe – Geography

0003 – Joe – Physics

0004 – Joe – Maths

0005 - Fred - Art

0006 - Fred - Music

0006 - Fred - D&T

0007 - Fred - SLT

 

What we are trying to do is to get the repro user to do away with this folder, so what I envisage happening is, the repro user would log onto the MFD as theirself and then either find the dept/user, then the user/dept and then put the job through as that user in that department. At the moment the repro user has to look up the user in the folder, find the department and then key in the relevant code associated with that user and department. Is there a way to do this the way we want in papercut? I thought with papercut, you could only go down to department level and put the documents through as the department, rather than select a user of that department.

 

Then the bursar would like to run reports on who in what department has printed what - if that makes sense?

[tmcd35]

Our reprographics lady is a member of all departments. When she logs in she can select from a list of departments to charge the job by department. Unfortunately the DocuPro has a limit to the number of departments it will display on the MFD screen. If you have too meny departments, as we do, you'll have to either type the full name of the department in to the MFD or use department codes as before. Again this only goes down to department level, not user.