Print Monitoring and Limiting

[Guest M0MST]

Hi All.

 

Looking for some opinions here. I have recently installed 3 new colour laser printers in our school to replace all of the old inkjets they were using. Anyways, they seem to like the "high" life now and find printing 30 pictures a day as full page fax prints as the norm, and causing us to run out of money already.

 

I currently use papercut free to "monitor" whos doing what, although it doesnt show amount of color use. I have seen the Papercut NG at £380, which seems a small amount, however if I could do it cheaper it would be excellent.

 

Does anyone have any suggestions.

[siuko]

I know you already mentioned papercut.

 

We use it here and its been great.

 

We also really like the print queue release utility (you get 1 free with papercut ng and can pay for more release queues if needed). It stops all printing to an A3 printer we have, holds it in a queue and is only printed once one of the technology teachers allows it.

[3s-gtech]

Papercut is great, also look into the alternatives, PrintManager etc, that should do what you want. Believe me, you very quickly recoup the cost of the software (we did within a few months!)

[Guest M0MST]

I hope we will do, we are only a small school, circa 60 Pc's and laptops. I will try and see if I can get the funding for it.

 

Dont know if there are any others out there, but papercut seems to be the most popular

[Guest M0MST]

Just on a quick note, any papercut NG users out there,

 

From what I gather there is software for the end users, however I cannot find it (somewhere to display the messages and charges)

 

Thanks

[Gatt]

another +1 for PaperCut

Just got it installed and working here

It can even monitor locally attached printers, give environmental impact reports (tree's, CO2, Bulb usage equivelant)

[3s-gtech]

Just on a quick note, any papercut NG users out there,

 

From what I gather there is software for the end users, however I cannot find it (somewhere to display the messages and charges)

 

Thanks

 

It's installed to a folder in the Papercut Server install - Program Files\PaperCut NG\client

[Guest M0MST]

They missed a trick with no MSI there, Thanks for the heads up though.

[siuko]

Yeah there is a papercut client - its normally found in one of the server folders... let me go find where

 

Edit - Its called pc-client.exe (for windows) - mine is in my papercut NG/client/win folder.

Edited November 5, 2010 by siuko

[Soulfish]

We use the papercut client here. There lack of MSI isn't that big a deal - it runs on login directly from the papercut server (although caches its self locally). They're supposed to be giving us an MSI version at some point, but to be honest I'm not that fussed . What I'm more interested in is getting the features of the manager mode popup available off-the-glass on the embedded Papercut-MF installs .

[elsiegee40]

I hope we will do, we are only a small school, circa 60 Pc's and laptops. I will try and see if I can get the funding for it.

 

Dont know if there are any others out there, but papercut seems to be the most popular

 

I've got just under 50 machines, 150 pupils plus staff and Print Manager Plus is a godsend that paid for itself long ago. PaperCut will pay for itself, have no fear!

[Guest M0MST]

We use the papercut client here. There lack of MSI isn't that big a deal - it runs on login directly from the papercut server (although caches its self locally). They're supposed to be giving us an MSI version at some point, but to be honest I'm not that fussed . What I'm more interested in is getting the features of the manager mode popup available off-the-glass on the embedded Papercut-MF installs .

 

Ok, I have not seen any software been installed as of yet, Must admit the documentation could be better.

 

However next week whilst im having our wireless installed I should have time to sit back and have a read

[Guest M0MST]

I've got just under 50 machines, 150 pupils plus staff and Print Manager Plus is a godsend that paid for itself long ago. PaperCut will pay for itself, have no fear!

 

Very Similar, 185 pupils, just as many staff and around 76 PC's (according to my sophos enterprise console), I have around 80 connected though.

 

Printer Manager Plus is something that was mentioned by one of my suppliers who are fitting our wireless next week, will check it out

[themightymrp]

We use PCounter from Altman Technologies. It integrates with your AD and you can set limits on how much users can print in a set period of time (i.e. 100 sheets per month). You can set rules on printers to allow certain paper sizes/types etc and it can give detailed reports on what an individual has printed or what jobs have gone through a particular printer. We have it set so that colour prints go to a paused queue and members of staff have to authorize the jobs before they begin to print. So far has been a great saving for us.

 

Very powerful and well worth it!!

[MatthewL]

Another one here with PCounter. Very good bit of software.

[fiona_b]

you can make a msi out of the papercut client with some tweaking i think.

I assume the reason for the lack of msi, regardless of how easy it can make life is simply because running the client software from the network share means when new client software is released there will be no extra admin as users will simply access the network share and be using the latest files all the time.

As for documentation being better, i hate reading manuals my self but having configured papercut a few times the manual and online kb contained everything i needed but i expect my install wasnt as advanced as most here.

[maniac]

We us papercut here, and I just used some VB script to copy the client program to all my workstations at startup. As we have a lot of wireless laptops, 20 or 30 of them all trying to run the client from the network share at login was causing a bit of a bottleneck. It does cause a little bit of an issue when they upgrade it, but with a little tweaking of the script I get it to compare the .exe file and to re-copy the client files if there's a newer version on the server.

 

I've found papercut to be very intuative to use, and needed to read very little of its documentation to get it working. We've gone quite far with its implementation here, we have release queues for the students to print, no more that 3 copies of a doucment, restrictions on printing the same document within 60 seconds (to stop people bypassing the 3 copies rule) and a rule to stop un-saved work being printed (To make sure students save their work before printing) We also use print credits for staff and students and we are quite strict with these limits, only handing out extra credit when it's absolutely necessary. Took a bit of getting used to for the staff, and taken us a while to get the formula right for the amount of credits we hand out, but we slashed out toner useage from about £14k in the year before it's introduction to around just 5k last year, a massive saving. (Some of that was also due in part to scrapping pretty much all our inkjet printers at the same time.)

 

The only non-restricted staff members are Admin, because of the mailmerge letters they do, and senior management who have restrictions on what they can print, but no credit limit on the account. Even we have the same limits as everyone else, although we hardly print anything.

 

All in all it works very well.

Edited November 11, 2010 by maniac