Central Printer Management

[asanders]

Here is my problem in our district we have a total of 28 laptop carts. None of these laptop carts have printers. Lately teachers have been asking for access to printers either by installing a printer on a cart or giving them access to a copier/printer in their building. We understand their need to have access to printers and would like to come up with a solution for them. The following are not options giving them direct access to copiers/printers or installing printers on the carts.

In a perfect world this is how we would like our solution to work. Have a web based release station for teachers to access a print queue. When a teacher logs in to the web based release station they would see a list of Printers. Then the teacher would click on the printer and see the jobs sitting in the queue and release/delete any job on that printer. I’m trying to avoid having to install any software on a computer to do this.

 

Currently we have a product called CZ Job tracker and it works well for tracking printer usage. It does have an add-on for a release station, but it is an application you have to install. I have taken a quick look at Papercut-ng this product held great promise, but the web based release station shows all of the printers. I only want the teachers to see the printers I specify and I only want them to see printers in the building they are stationed in. In a brief back and forth with Papercut they did tell me that I could install multiple instances of their product to try and get my desired results. However reporting would be an issue.

 

So can anyone recommend a printer management product that is web base that might allow me to do what I’m looking for?

[pwds]

Print Manager Plus does most of what you want off the shelf, and we do exactly what you are after for several printers. I can't remember if it was hacked to give a page for a specific printer, or if it passes that via URL and we just had to set specific shortcuts.

 

We are running a legacy version here now though, so it may well have everything you want as part of the standard install.

 

Presumably from what you've said you already have (a) central print server?

[asanders]

Thanks! In fact I just got off of the phone with them and this does seem like it is going to do what we want it to.