Printer Managment Software

[maniac]

Print management software simplifies this process greatly. You can do instant searches on users, what they've printed where and when, produce useage graphs, see how my colour printing gets printed vs B/W.

 

Also asides from the monitoring side, you can introduce certain 'rules' to stop people printing multiple copies, stop users printing to certain printers, give users a certain number of 'credits' to encourage them to think about what they're printing, limit a colour printer to B/W only for certain users, and a hundred other settings.

 

So yes, I think it's a pretty essential part of most networks these days, especially when the likes of papercut do a version of their product you can use for free for monitoring purposes.

 

Some schools do charge users when when they go over their quota. Personally we don't, we use Papercut mainly for finding out how much stuff is actually being printed and where, so we can plan how much toner we need to order! We do have a few users on restricted accounts who have historically abused the printing system thou.

 

Mike.

[mikeymike]

Print management software simplifies this process greatly. You can do instant searches on users, what they've printed where and when, produce useage graphs, see how my colour printing gets printed vs B/W.

 

Also asides from the monitoring side, you can introduce certain 'rules' to stop people printing multiple copies, stop users printing to certain printers, give users a certain number of 'credits' to encourage them to think about what they're printing, limit a colour printer to B/W only for certain users, and a hundred other settings.

 

So yes, I think it's a pretty essential part of most networks these days, especially when the likes of papercut do a version of their product you can use for free for monitoring purposes.

 

Some schools do charge users when when they go over their quota. Personally we don't, we use Papercut mainly for finding out how much stuff is actually being printed and where, so we can plan how much toner we need to order! We do have a few users on restricted accounts who have historically abused the printing system thou.

 

Mike.

 

ye fair enough lol not used one before so obviously dont know how many different tools you can use. with my school being small quite lucky i guess as there isnt that much toner abuse going on. cheers for that

[elsiegee40]

just a quick few questions here guys. firstly im wondering do you actually need a printer management tool as there is a option you can tick on most modern good printers now to keep the print jobs so you can see who is taking the **ss. i do work in a school that has only 60 ish pc's so that could well be why we dont need a tool like that. and do you actually charge for certain printing??

 

I'm in a school with even fewer PCs than you and we use Print Manager Plus. Our toner bills were astronomical until we introduced PMP and used "real" pricing for the pages. It was made clear to all that PMP allowances were restrictions NOT budgets!

 

We charge 10p for mono and 35p for Colour - but this is not actually charged to anyone. Most staff have a limit of £6.32 per week and pupils are restricted to 70p per day. A few super-users have unlimited printing (like the secretary, bursar and me ) And a few staff have a higher print allowance which we control by making them members of sepcially set up AD Security Groups.

 

The toner bill has halved since we introduced it and everyone sems to be able to print what they need. I particularly like Print Job Verification where PMP tells the user exacytly what they are trying to print... e.g. 2 pages to the Colour Laser will cost you 70p and leave your allowance at £2.25, is this OK. At this point the user can OK or Cancel the job.

[mrforgetful]

We used PMP but then changed to Papercut a years ago.

 

Papercut is a lot more friendly to use I think and also a lot faster!

 

One thing I'm thinking of moving back to PMP for though is this ability:

 

We have mulitple departments who want to charge for using their printers (as they pay for toner).

With Papercut you give your users a pool of money and then you can debit that on an individual printer basis, but it all debits from one big pot.

This means when our students have £2.00 for printing from ICT printers it's all fine, but not Art and SEN want to charge too which doesn't work well as the print logs would all have to be checked to see where each user printed.

 

PMP on the other hand can be configured so that users get more than one pool of money which can be set to be debited when different printers are used.

[Geoff]

Duplicate your print queues. So when a user is in a location they get print queues that reflect that location. So for example when they are in IT they get the the 'IT-Art', 'IT-IT and 'IT-SEN' Print Queues. You can then determine usage on a per printer and per location basis.

[mrforgetful]

Do you have more information on how to to that?

 

For example where in Papercut do I define a Print Queue?

 

(ps I'm still using version 6.x)

[hcrejazz]

We used Print Manager Plus for a while but it was buggy for our 600-700 print queues. I wanted a all web based solution and went with Print Limit Pro. By far the best piece of print software I have seen.

[ranj]

papercut here.

[hcrejazz]

You look at both products Papercut and PrintLimitPro and they are exactly the same. Somebody is ripping sombody off?

[SOSAGES]

You look at both products Papercut and PrintLimitPro and they are exactly the same. Somebody is ripping sombody off?

 

PLP is a rebranded version of papercut software (you will find a few in other countries)

[sirsir]

Pcounter here as well. Works as server side app - no clent install.

 

Very good, on both Novell & Windows.

[juaw09]

Thanks