Papercut MF vs Hive

[ITea]

Hi

 

Our 5 year lease deal with our Canon/Uniflow (on-prem) MFP solution is about to end. I'm currently looking at other solutions, obviously Papercut being the main alternative.

 

I just wondered what experience people have had with Papercut MF and Hive, which they chose and why, and whether or not they are still happy with that decision.

 

Any feedback would be gratefully received.

[Julian]

Papercut works with multiple different manufactures devices, we had Canon, Ricoh, and Riso devices, and having just one Print and Copy management solution, really helped.

The configuration was fairly flexible, and easy.

 

The way I have configured our copy of Papercut, is to give everybody a Papercut login, there are no department codes (This means that there is no anonymous printing). Users who can charge to multiple cost centres (some staff) are given a list of the cost enters that they personally can charge (So Science teachers see the Science cost centre, but not the MFL cost centre)

 

We are also using “Follow me” printing, originally some users were concerned about security of their printout, they have now realised, that nothing is printed out until they personally are at the photocopier and release the document, to be immediately collected by themselves.

[ITea]

Thanks Julian, that's really useful.

 

Did you go for Hive of MF, and what dictated your decision?

 

We're looking at renewing our fleet of copiers (22) and the software. We currently use Uniflow on prem. Uniflow Cloud has been around for longer than Hive but, as good as the Canon devices have been, the automated toner supply has failed on a number of occasions, leaving us without for a few days, which is suboptimal to say the least. Maybe were an isolated case, or perhaps Canon put more effort into their larger customers. Either way, I'm very keen to look at Papercut which seems to be the standard in the educational sector.

[gszech]

Thanks Julian, that's really useful.

 

Did you go for Hive of MF, and what dictated your decision?

 

We're looking at renewing our fleet of copiers (22) and the software. We currently use Uniflow on prem. Uniflow Cloud has been around for longer than Hive but, as good as the Canon devices have been, the automated toner supply has failed on a number of occasions, leaving us without for a few days, which is suboptimal to say the least. Maybe were an isolated case, or perhaps Canon put more effort into their larger customers. Either way, I'm very keen to look at Papercut which seems to be the standard in the educational sector.

 

Majority of schools that are using PaperCut are on MF. Hive is a new product and there are few post here saying that it's quite limited in it's functionality. Saying this we are planning to test PaperCut Hive in our primary schools in near feature because just so we can get rid of servers.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Thanks Julian, that's really useful.

 

Did you go for Hive of MF, and what dictated your decision?

 

We're looking at renewing our fleet of copiers (22) and the software. We currently use Uniflow on prem. Uniflow Cloud has been around for longer than Hive but, as good as the Canon devices have been, the automated toner supply has failed on a number of occasions, leaving us without for a few days, which is suboptimal to say the least. Maybe were an isolated case, or perhaps Canon put more effort into their larger customers. Either way, I'm very keen to look at Papercut which seems to be the standard in the educational sector.

 

Majority of schools that are using PaperCut are on MF. Hive is a new product and there are few post here saying that it's quite limited in it's functionality. Saying this we are planning to test PaperCut Hive in our primary schools in near feature because just so we can get rid of servers.

[PotNoodleTech]

Papercut is brilliant and not really very expensive when bundled in with the MFD fleet (and if you implement some rules for general daily printing e.g. forcing 2 sided and forcing mono - it pays for itself easily within it's 3 or 5 year MFD fleet lease).

 

I can't imagine life without it to be honest MFDs here are fit and forget we literally have to do nothing on a daily basis other than paper and the odd toner. Helps that the Ricoh MFDs are ultra reliable of course.

[Julian]

Hive was not available when we went with Papercut MF.

 

I would like to recommend “Follow-Me” printing, if one photocopier is not working, just go to another photocopier, and get you printing at that machine.

[ITea]

Thanks folks.

 

We use 'Follow-me-printing' on our existing Canon/Uniflow setup, which is hugely valuable if a machine is out of action etc., so I would definitely keep that. Plus default to B&W, and duplex.

 

As far as I can currently see, MF has a of more functionality, the most useful of which (to us at least) is the inbuilt reporting, which is far superior to the very limited options in Hive, although you can spend some time setting up something similar using something like 'Power BI' if using Azure. The rest of the Hive functionality seems to cover what we want, plus Hive will Auto-update and should, in theory, be more secure than MF, which had an issue earlier this year.

 

Has anyone used Power BI on Hive to create custom reports?

[Sylv3r]

Stay away from PaperCut Hive for now there's certainly teething issues with it's use in Education especially around shared devices.

 

We have been working with PaperCut and hopefully there's a fix pending which will resolve this headache.

[ITea]

That's interesting to hear. Can you give any specific examples re shared device issues?

[DalekSec]

I'm trailing Pocket atm soon to trail hive, should do job for us but we're private company and not education. I can see it working 1-2-1 easy enough but can see it struggling in shared.

[IKWeb]

We use Hive - this is in a Trust of 45+ schools - works great. if you have any questions more than happy to help answer them.

[dobsonl]

Have they added accounting to hive yet?

[IKWeb]

Currently no - but its coming - But that said - depending on what you mean by accounting - you can pull PowerBI reports off to see what people are doing.

 

If you mean - quotas then no - this is what is due out shortly.

[EeboBebo]

We use Hive - this is in a Trust of 45+ schools - works great. if you have any questions more than happy to help answer them.

 

What manufacturers of devices are you using with hive? We got hive last year for use with Toshiba MFPs and we had to sack it off as it just didn’t work properly

[IKWeb]

I have found speaking to others using the system - it really is down to the device, some users with some hardware have had a horrid time, for me - I have over 100+ Konica devices within Hive and it works great.

[Sylv3r]

We use Hive - this is in a Trust of 45+ schools - works great. if you have any questions more than happy to help answer them.

 

That's interesting - are your students all using One to One devices? We've had fun and games especially in primary with the students all needing to click the activation link via e-mail in order to be able to print from the device. It's doable (but still a pain in secondary) but certainly for primaries we don't feel it's fit for purpose currently. We have been in discussions with both KM and PaperCut and hopefully there's a fix coming immiently.

[ITea]

Thanks for all the info, which I really appreciate.

 

It seems that Hive is not quite there for our setup, primarily because of the shared printing issues. It's certainly something we can look in the future as we move to a 1-2-1 setup.

 

Last question then: do you host MF on prem, or do you host it externally? And what that drove that decision?

[hallb15]

We host MF on prem. That's what was recommended at the time it was installed (about 5 years ago I think) and it has worked pretty much flawlessly since. It's on a VM with 4vCPUs and 8GB RAM (not dynamic) which is more than adequate for our needs (Primary school with 98 staff, 650 pupils, averaging about 2.5K print jobs a week)

[Ratcliffepg]

Have anyone managed to deploy Hive Print Client successful via Intune ?

[IKWeb]

Hi

 

Yes. All my sites use Intune and I deploy both packages. The user and PC package via intune.

[Ratcliffepg]

I am having issues deploying the user package, says it requires admin rights to install, fails with a message to that effect

[IKWeb]

Can you post a pic of the error?

[steveg]

Has anyone else found papercut to be really expensive? Just getting quotes in for copiers now and papercut works out more expensive than all the copiers do.

[IKWeb]

Depends what version of Papercut ur looking to buy. Hive is 1 licence per device. Which for us was really cheap.

[steveg]

Depends what version of Papercut ur looking to buy. Hive is 1 licence per device. Which for us was really cheap.

 

I've had 2 companies quote for hive and 1 for MF, for 8 devices it came to more than the full cost of the copiers. Hive was a fair bit more than MF, but MF was still expensive.