PaperCut Issue

[garethEds]

Hi All,

 

Our LEA have changed MFD provider from KM to Kyocera. We are due to receive several Kyocera machines soon to replace some of the KMs. This means two types of provider. Apparently we have been told PaperCut cannot deal with this and we would need two installations - one for the legacy KMs and one for the new Kyocera.

 

Staff use a secure queue only to print and at the moment this can be accessed via the KMs.

 

Has anyone come up with a way of getting around this and using the same pull/secure queue over two different systems? I don't really want to force the staff to choose at it would confuse some of them. :-)

 

So - one server, two MFD providers, one secure queue.

 

Can anyone advise? LEA say it cannot be done. Please prove them wrong.... )

 

Gareth

[Steve21]

I’m assuming this is more related to 1 license required than not supporting two providers

 

Best bet would be tall to selectec or papercut and see about merging the two licenses (until renewal) etc

 

Steve

[mrbios]

It'd have its own set of limitations in terms of being able to do advanced print functions, but if you create a secure print queue using the papercut global print driver, that might work?

 

EDIT: unless it is a license issue as above of course..

[Michael]

I was thinking the license, but also the driver for the shared queue.

 

I suspect it's most likely the print driver, rather than Papercut itself.

[Olliedawg]

Papercut offer a global print driver, although advanced print features are limited. This could work if you put all the printers under the same followme virtual queue. For advanced features you would probably need to map the individual printers with the correct driver

[Boredguy]

We've had the same issue with our new printer fleet this half term, as most of our devices are Kyocera, but we have a Ricoh for our high volume Reprographics.

 

I've had to setup 2 different Print Release queues, so that the majority of the users can use the Kyocera kit, but only specific stations get the Ricoh queue. Without doing this and selecting a universal driver we got nothing by hundreds of pages of gibbering when PDF's were printed and very limited options.

 

So now our Follow Me queue is set as the Driver for our highest spec'd Kyocera Copier and everything is fine.

There is nothing stopping Papercut from having different brands in the same instance, you just can't have them in the same virtual print queue due to Drivers.

As long as your Papercut licence has the correct number of MF licences for your devices, they can be added easily enough.

[MatthewL]

PaperCut can deal with multi providers but you would need 2 print queues to use all functions unless you use something like the PaperCut universal print driver.

 

It's not not reommended to mix fleets but you can do and it will work it just get a bit messy.

[PaperCutterBrenda]

Hi there, PaperCutter Brenda here! If I understand your question correctly... you can have both KM and Kyocera going to the same virtual queue, but you'd want to make sure the different devices can both read the print jobs. I would reference this section in our manual: https://www.papercut.com/help/manuals/ng-mf/applicationserver/find-me-global-print-driver/

Most of the time this works, but each environment is different so you should test it before pushing to production. And when in doubt, you can always ask your reseller for some guidance. Hope that helps!

[ITGURU]

I was advised that you need 2 different queues for different manufacturers. We have a fleet of samsung machines and whilst one was repaired, swapped for a Konica. Whilst the driver worked and the documents prints, we then had 1 additional page printed after the job with a PCL error.

For the duration of the loan copier, we put up with the extra page rather than creating another queue for different parts of the school as all users use any copier, however I was informed that the follow-me queue all needs to have the same manufacturer hardware.

[PotNoodleTech]

There's the print queue issue as specified above - you'd likely need two queues for the two makes of MFD.

 

There also a licencing issue on the actual papercut install - for example my papercut licence is covered as part of my Ricoh contract, if I then moved to Kycoera my Ricoh papercut licence would become invalid and that papercut install may become disabled at some point - can you still use the old installation and just add a new licence to it? I don't know. Can you run the old installation with half the KM licence and half the Kyocera licence? I don't know but probably not. So it may be the licencing issue your LEA is referring to as a significant problem rather than the print queue issue.

Edited April 19, 2023 by PotNoodleTech

[howartp]

The driver issue has been covered.

 

You need to convert half your old KM licenses to Kyocera; we do the same (per-whole-fleet) every time we change suppliers.

 

But, I made sure WE own and procure our Papercut instances/licenses, so I can contact our reseller and get them flipped completely vendor-agnostic. Every tender I do for copiers, someone tries to include costs for supporting and converting our PCut licenses but I cross them off and make it clear those parts are not deliverable.

[PotNoodleTech]

But, I made sure WE own and procure our Papercut instances/licenses, so I can contact our reseller and get them flipped completely vendor-agnostic. Every tender I do for copiers, someone tries to include costs for supporting and converting our PCut licenses but I cross them off and make it clear those parts are not deliverable.

 

Very nice this sounds like a damn good idea.

[MatthewL]

If you run multiple types of machine you can have different embedded licenses on your system it doesn't affect things. I had a customer once back in the day that had a mix of machines.