PaperCut Print Management, what do I need to know?

[fairm010]

Hi all, its been quite a while since I posted on here, life takes over sometimes!

 

We are looking into Papercut NG here, to get hold of what we are printing and reduce costs.

 

Please can people share their experiences with Papercut, list anything I need to know before buying into it, and lastly report any savings in printing you have seen?

 

Much appreciated, thank you very much!

 

Matt

[kathabell]

We use Papercut MF because we wanted to track "on the glass" copying as well as printing, although I understand the code is very similar to NG. It isn't a full "managed" solution but we have enforced a few rules; default duplex, no more than 30 pages to a laser, warning messages on printing emails in colour etc. 9 months later we have cut the toner bill by £4K and have made savings on the paper budget too (although this is harder for us to quantify). Reports to budget holders are automated, emailing them their bills every month... overall we are very pleased with Papercut, and it is definitely saving us money.

[TechMonkey]

Awesome. We are on Papercut MF, so it is integrated into our MFDs.

 

What we have done here is get everyone into Accounts. So lower school teaching staff are in a lower school account, admin staff are in a general account, etc etc. That way at the end of term I can produce a report that will show the accounts department exactly who spent what and they can allocate appropriately. Obviously this might be per department. The issue is if a teacher is in more than one area. What we did is allocated them to an over all account as ours is quite simple, but you could allocate them access to each account and get them to choose. Bit of a faff but if you need it allocated that is what needs to be done.

 

One issue is Papercut doesn't record everything. No fault of it's, somethings done at a machine level can't be tracked (engineer prints or test runs, cancellations on the machine) so our invoice figures don't totally match our Papercut figures. Apparently there are fixes that can mitigate most of the issues and we have someone coming out to look at that.

 

Beyond that things like stopping Doc1 named documents being sent are great, as these are the usual suspects for abuse and forces the children (both large and small) to save their work rather than print and then lose it. It is AD integrated so no extra account management.

 

Another issue we hit was different card readers read our cards as different numbers. No idea why, no one else knows why. This was gotten around by one company adjusting where their reader looked and stored numbers to the second slot. I have no idea what to do if we get another type of reader that reads it in a third manner!

 

It is hard to say much more as it will entirely depend on your use case and what you want it to do, but I can bet Papercut will do it or there will be someone who will know how to do it.

[fairm010]

Thanks very much, I've passed that onto our SBM!

[MatthewL]

You can download NG from the PaperCut site and trial for 40 days. If you have MFDs and want to integrate them you need MF and maybe other bits for the copiers depending on the make and model.

 

You can put restrictions, scripts as a start on printers to help reduce printing, have a look at the demo NG site here.

 

Education get PaperCut at a steel, you need to invest but you will save, especially on the little desktop printers when you start putting rules in the system. You can redirect big jobs to cheaper printers.

 

There isn't much you cannot do, also archiving is a handy feature and can be a good safeguarding one.

 

Any questions ask, I am quite well versed in the product as I install and configure it several times a month for customers plus the support of it.

[Edu-IT]

Awesome. We are on Papercut MF, so it is integrated into our MFDs.

 

What we have done here is get everyone into Accounts. So lower school teaching staff are in a lower school account, admin staff are in a general account, etc etc. That way at the end of term I can produce a report that will show the accounts department exactly who spent what and they can allocate appropriately. Obviously this might be per department. The issue is if a teacher is in more than one area. What we did is allocated them to an over all account as ours is quite simple, but you could allocate them access to each account and get them to choose. Bit of a faff but if you need it allocated that is what needs to be done.

 

One issue is Papercut doesn't record everything. No fault of it's, somethings done at a machine level can't be tracked (engineer prints or test runs, cancellations on the machine) so our invoice figures don't totally match our Papercut figures. Apparently there are fixes that can mitigate most of the issues and we have someone coming out to look at that.

 

Beyond that things like stopping Doc1 named documents being sent are great, as these are the usual suspects for abuse and forces the children (both large and small) to save their work rather than print and then lose it. It is AD integrated so no extra account management.

 

Another issue we hit was different card readers read our cards as different numbers. No idea why, no one else knows why. This was gotten around by one company adjusting where their reader looked and stored numbers to the second slot. I have no idea what to do if we get another type of reader that reads it in a third manner!

 

It is hard to say much more as it will entirely depend on your use case and what you want it to do, but I can bet Papercut will do it or there will be someone who will know how to do it.

To pick up on a few points.

 

There are ways to track cancellations on the machine. PaperCut provides hardware validation whereby the printer reports back the before and after print count and if PaperCut doesn't get back what it's expecting, it adjusts the job. It does however add an overhead as the device is having to report back to PaperCut the counts and it can slow down printing. It's generally reliable but can be hardware dependent.

 

Which MFD devices do you have? Our engineers use a special manufacturer code so their copies don't cause click costs. Might be worth looking at?

[ReverentCreature]

Its brilliant. It works great. We have PaperCut MF here as we have the papercut firmware installed on our Sharp photocopiers.

 

Some of the things we have done:

Scheduled import of user groups from the server. Groups we already use such as "Teaching Staff" and "Year 6".

Setting up of filters for the machines such as no print jobs over 100 pages and no print jobs over £5.

Custom user messages - balloon taskbar notifications using supplied MSI package deployed to the computers.

Linking of papercut to e-mail so users can send print jobs as a PDF attachment to a generic email account.

Group reports showing usage for each group (department) for billing. We do not assign credit balance to users.

Easy disabling of student users disallowed printing rights.

 

One virtual print queue that everyone prints to. Work can then be released from any printer or photocopier that nearby or working.

Use of our door entry cards so when users swipe a photocopier they get asked to enter their windows login to associate the card.

Allowed or blocked certain year groups of children from logging on to the photocopiers.

Linking staff users to year groups of children so a teacher can release print jobs for their year group as well as their own work.

Installation of client software on third party machines in BYOD scenario.

Edited February 5, 2016 by ReverentCreature

[MatthewL]

There is no PaperCut firmware for Sharp MFD's, all you are doing is displaying a webpage on the Sharp device. It is just 2 URL's setup as an application that display what is needed.

[gaz350b]

we store ID card numbers in each AD users office field (currently safecom) we are looking to move to papercut, anyone know if papercut can look at an AD field to import their card numbers?

 

edit:

silly me simple google search found this

http://www.papercut.com/kb/Main/ImportingCardNumbers

Edited February 5, 2016 by gaz350b

[timbo343]

As most have given their views of papercut i have nothing but praise for it. Ive been using the different versions since 2007, starting with the free version, then buying the NG version and now using the MF version.

 

Its one of the best pieces of software on our network. It's so flexible and if you know your scripting you can do some pretty amazing stuff with it and its so easy to use, to the point everything is ahere you expect it to be .

 

If you have any questions, post them, there are a fair few users on here that use it so you arent far away from someone who can help.

[MatthewL]

Yes PaperCut can, there is a box to enable this under admin and user/group sync. Think it pulls it from the pager field but suspect this can be modified in the advanced config, never had the need to change but that's the field used often to link Biometric's all up to it too.

 

Any questions feel free to ask.

[synaesthesia]

We've been using NG for years, and then last year went to MF to manage our Repro department devices, with card scanners to charge the relevant departments. We've had major issues with the system but nothing to do with Papercut, we suspect dodgy HP drivers; the point is that Papercut regardless have been utterly unrelenting in helping us trying to solve the problem. The product is great and their support is absolutely fantastic.