Papercut experiences

[JoeFulford]

Hi Guys,

 

My boss (the finance and business director) has spoken to our printer support company and decided to get Papercut installed. I'll have to set this up over the Easter whenever I'm free. We're also getting to new RISO printers wooo! Our's sucked before, never worked properly. But anyway, back on track. Has anyone here had much experience with Papercut.

 

I'm not talking about installing the software, because I'm sure that'll be a doddle. But I mean actual experience with it. Does it work effectively? I currently running Impero here to manage print credits which prevents our pupils spamming out hundreds of pages of Justin Bieber posters to put on their bedroom wall (trust me, that's happened here before! ). I also use the Papercut print logger which is pretty nice. It compiles any print's sent in a CSV.

 

Any answers would be nice to hear.

 

Cheers all!

[Marshall_IT]

I used the full version of papercut for around 2 years at my old school with pull printing.

 

I found it fantastic, much better than pcounter.

I set up monthly reports for each dept head so they could berate their staff for using too much budget o A3 colour printing.

 

Brought the printing for each dept down considerably.

[3s-gtech]

Effective? Yes. As well as being simple to set up and manage, with AD integration etc, it has drastically cut our printing costs and enabled us to charge printing appropriately. We use massively less toner than before (we've had PC for around six years now). It paid for itself in the first year, let alone subsequently. We stuck with an old version for some time, until we needed to expand so updated then.

 

It also works very nicely with parent/child print servers, for managing sub and trusted domains centrally.

[Dos_Box]

Moving to correct forum.

[googlemad]

Very good software, fairly easy to use for both the end user and administrator yet also quite powerful if you have the time to go through it properly.

 

We had PCounter before which 'worked' but I was terrified of changing much in case it broke the entire system! The interface was also getting out of date and very clunky to use whereas Papercut has a clear web based interface.

[Marc_EduTech]

We've been using Papercut for a few months now, and I can only say the experience has been pretty good thus far.

Setup and management really was simple, and staff have taken to it fairly well too.

So far, so good I would say!

[MrLudwig]

Another thumbs up for PaperCut here. Had it in for about a year now and have seen a big reduction in our printing costs. We use the MF version as part of out lease deal with several Kyocera MFD devices (which are also very good) and have the PaperCut agent installed directly on them which integrates with the rest of the PaperCut system. Works really well and didn't take very long for the staff or students to get used to despite the school never having any print management systems in place previously.

[Diello]

Brilliant software - One of the few that is simple to use, and does exactly what it says on the tin. Set it, and forget it. Reporting is great, and can log against group accounts as well, which is great for teachers who are also HoY etc. Has cut down on a lot of wastage. Highly recommended.

[sparkeh]

Yep papercut is awesome. Easy to use, great reports and the scripting makes it very customisable. Halved our print costs.

[FragglePete]

We have been using it since September along with two devices that use the embedded software. Heads of Faculty love it and it gives a true breakdown of printer costs and follow me printing is proving popular with our Sixth Formers. We set up accounts for Faculties that staff use, so they get a drop down box to select with faculty gets charged when they print. For students, we use a changing PIN system - every hour a script runs as a task sequence and regenerates five digit pin numbers for each faculty. This is also exported to a JSON file which staff access via an internal webserver to reveal each PIN code while in a lesson so students printing also gets charged to individual faculties. We emulated what @MicrodigitUK has setup - link here (http://www.edugeek.net/forums/enterprise-software/134343-papercut.html)

 

Pete

[RabbieBurns]

Timely thread. Installing and setting up papercut is one of my Easter holiday jobs too.

 

Apologies for hijacking OP

 

Can I just install the trial version to get us going fully functional and then licnese the software within 30 days?

 

Do any of you use the ipad native app on a large enterprise network with a large ipad deployment without finding the bonjour broadcasts killing the network?

[Crumpet]

Very straightforward and it cut down a lot of time spent dealing with printer/toner issues.

 

The only downside so far is that we haven't been able to get it running with iPads and Papercut doesn't seem to have a decent solution. However, i think this issue is more to to with Apple's business model of making people buy more expensive iShiny products than papercut itself.

[mowgli82]

@RabbieBurns yes you can, just add the licence file.

[Big_Ted]

For iPad printing please see:

iOS Printing (iPad & iPhone) and/or Collobos - Presto

[digone52]

We use Papercut, and it's been a fantastic product to track printing by department by pupils and staff.

 

However, after implementing Papercut and a chargeback mechanism to try to keep costs under control, our printing costs may have actually gone up 2014-2015.

 

There are suggestions of scrapping the chargeback as it costs to administer it.

 

Can I therefore ask if possible - to reduce the printing costs of a school, is it reasonable in your experience to expect people to print less volume on an existing infrastructure (with many printers), or are the cost reductions more to do with centralising and reducing the number of printers?

[Wubbalubbadub]

Thumbs up for papercut from here!

[JoeFulford]

Timely thread. Installing and setting up papercut is one of my Easter holiday jobs too.

 

Apologies for hijacking OP

 

Can I just install the trial version to get us going fully functional and then licnese the software within 30 days?

 

Do any of you use the ipad native app on a large enterprise network with a large ipad deployment without finding the bonjour broadcasts killing the network?

 

Haha no problem Rabbie. Glad to see someone else in my position!

[JoeFulford]

Thanks a lot everyone for all the great replies. Seems like good software. Really excited to get it implemented and monitor our costs more effectively. Should hopefully save our Reprographics manager a lot of time and effort.

[lyricalway]

Very happy to endorse Papercut. Had it here for 3/4/years. Upgraded to RISO hub (Follow me ) printers with embeded papercut..fantastic!

[karldenton]

We use full papercut MFD. Don't use it for credits though. Staff just started at 0 so whatever minus figure they are at is what they have used. Our sharp copier has a swipe card on it and staff print but it only comes out when they swipe there card.

 

Only software issue we have had is that students log in as other students and transfer credits away !! I've since disabled the transfer option

[Steve21]

Using Papercut here for MFDs etc, much nicer than PCounter (Old school).

 

Steve