PaperCut

Oops! Thanks for pointing that out ^ https://cdn1.papercut.com/web/marketing/collateral/papercut-sysadmin-of-the-year-2021.pdf

Some exciting news out of Microsoft headquarters yesterday, with the public launch of their new printing project “Universal Print”. Universal Print replaces key Windows Server functionality, so that Azure users no longer need self-hosted print servers. And there’s good news for those Azure users wanting to use PaperCut. Since 2019 we’ve been working with Microsoft on this project. Microsoft contacted us early on in development to ensure PaperCut MF would interface with Universal Print from the get-go. Which, as it happens, is what we have available for you to download today. We’ve created an easy-to-use integration with the Azure platform via Universal Print, and we’re looking forward to you trying it out! This new compatibility means Microsoft 365 and Azure customers adopting Universal Print as part of their cloud journey can use PaperCut MF to enjoy: printing that just works on every platform, printer, and device data protection before, during, and after printing a reduced environmental footprint, and shrinking bills the ability to scan and digitize documents to work smarter When PaperCut MF version 21.0 is released in April, the Universal Print integration will be included out of the box as standard - at no additional cost for PaperCut customers. All PaperCut licenses now also include Universal Print support, so there’s no price difference whether you’re using traditional print servers or moving to the cloud. Customers have been using PaperCut MF with Universal Print since the first beta release of the connector back in July 2020. This includes Val Verde School District in California, who became the first Universal Print customer success story on Microsoft’s Tech Community. “It was an easy choice for us to jump on Universal Print and make sure our customers could enjoy all the print management goodness of PaperCut MF on Microsoft’s new cloud print infrastructure.” Jamie says (he’s our resident Universal Print manager). Take it for a test drive and leave any questions in the comments.

Hey guys! Fiza is right! PaperCut Mobility Print is now a standalone 100% free product. TwistedHelixis, have a go and let us know if you need any help with the setup: https://www.papercut.com/products/free-software/mobility-print/ - Mikaela

Hey Andmcq! How did you go? Do you still have this issue? Let us know and we'll jump in to help. - Mikaela

Hey Timbo! Are you still having this issue? It's quite specific so I'll ask you to open our ticket with our support champions over at https://support.papercut.com/hc/en-us . Let us know if you have any more questions too! - Mikaela

Hi there, Are you still having this problem? Let us know and we can look into it further if you haven't already popped in a ticket. - Mikaela

Hey FoxHound! Mikaela from PaperCut here, just checking in. We know this post is from 2018, but we're always here to listen to the good, bad and ugly feedback on why you are considering moving away from us. It helps us improve our products for current customers, who seem to be rallying around this thread (thank you!). If you'd like some help on how we can better accommodate you, then slide into our DMs on here or email us at [email protected] before you 'officially' break up with us 3

SYNACK is probably in the best position to advise here as it's an ASP/IIS related error. I've seen this before when the file permissions were not set correctly. Check the perms on the web files as a first step. Maybe open it up a little and see if it helps. This MS KB article covers a few other suggestions. On a related note there is now a new release of the free PaperCut print logger. The main change is the cosmetic appearance (new look and feel). The work was done by the summer intern at PaperCut (yes it's summer down under!). Functionally it's the same and I've made sure that he did not change any of the printing history CSV file formats so SYNACK's scripts will still work. Cheers, Chris Developer@PaperCut

Yes. PaperCut can enforce duplex. However IMHO it's not a good idea. A better approach is to default drivers to duplex and instead display a "guilt trip" popup if a user selects single-sided. e.g. "By printing duplex you'll save X trees!" Here is an example. The text/design is customizable so you can turn it up or down as required. http://www.papercut.com/images/screenshots/pcng/print-policy-alert-sized.jpg The reason for this is there are often legitimate reasons why a user would what to print simplex. The obvious one is transparencies, or the requirement to fax the job after. Or even the old fashion teacher that manually cuts-n-pastes . Asking users to confirm via an alert popup is a good compromise. The same goes for: printing emails printing web pages in colour Show a print policy alert popup instead. Regarding the idea of a mandatory print preview. It's a great idea and I think something Microsoft should put in their print driver architecture as standard. Why make drivers all implement this with their own look-n-feel (and bugs!) Unfortunately MS have not many any significant changes to their print architecture in years! I've seen the Epson driver and it's a good start, but as you said the "extra fat" can lead to instability. Something Epson suffer from a little (just try their mac drivers ) Oh. Speaking of transparencies, this reminds me of a story my friend told me when he was working at ExxonMobile. His manager turned up to an important presentation with his transparencies printed in duplex! I hope he's not managing any Oil Rigs today Cheers, Chris Developer @ PaperCut

It depends on if we weight the votes for education vs. business. In the education space last year the number one by far was solving the wireless laptop/netbook printing problem. This was done with the Web Print feature - in short users can print from their notebook by simply uploading a PDF, DOC, etc. file via a web browser. The server does the printer on the user's behalf. This means you don't have to worry about print drivers and domain authentication. Tasks which are impossible with Windows "starter" versions or Debian distros seen on many netbooks! At the moment our current task is developing a dashboard that allows administrators to monitor the system printing status at a glance. Also an MIS packaged client is high on the list. We support a zero-install method for deploying the client software (in short running directly off a network share), however some sites still prefer MSIs for consistency with other Apps. It's always hard to please everyone. Voting is an effective way to save half the arguments in the dev team We try to make the process transparent and put the votes on the blog or twitter feeds. Here is one of priyanka's posts with a chart covering the topic. We also get a lot of crazy wild ideas. Half the time we can't work out if it's a joke. My favorite was the electric shock system. Don't print in duplex? - zap! Obviously a joke but an attractive idea. Cheers, Chris Developer @ PaperCut

The most crazy thing I've seen a school admin do to helped reduce paper was to print out the "most polluting users" report (trees consumed by each user) from PaperCut and post it on the staff notice board for all to see. He did this in his first week on the job at a new school! I suspect he did not make too many friends but I'm sure the teachers on the top of the list reviewed their printing habits! Another story I herd was a situation where a teacher printed a class set to the wrong printer. They went to the printer to collect, could not find it, then re-printed another set. About 5 or 6 attempts they finally worked out they were selecting the wrong printer. The school tech collected the huge pile off the other printer and had the balls dump it on the staff room table with a note: "Going cheap! 200 unwanted copies of Ms. Smith's year 9 class notes". Cheers, Chris Developer @ PaperCut

I gave him a poke! He was in a good mood this morning because his home brew beer won the local Melbourne BeerShare contest. Tom said it's high on his list. I'd encourage you to vote for the feature via About -> Product News -> Vote as Jason goes through this each week and updates the votes. The more you poke the quicker it gets done! At the moment Tom's main project is the new Dashboard. He's coordinating the design contest on 99designs and doing the Javascript behind it. This would be polished off in the next few weeks and his list will clear a little then. Cheers, Chris Developer @ PaperCut

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This is correct at current time (Nov 2010), however we've just finished PCL5 and this will be included in the 10.7 release which is scheduled for next week! Peter has also started working on PCL6 watermarking. PCL6 is a binary language and a bit nasty to work with but even so Peter has got the proof of concept code working today. Once we have Postscript, PCL5 and PCL6 we'll have pretty much all the major printer types covered. We'll announce the 10.7 release here: PaperCut Releases (and of course also on the twitter feed ) If you're interested to know what type of configuration is available, there are a few screen shots here: Adding username to print jobs. Watermarking was the number two voted for feature from education sites this year so we're working pretty hard to knock it off. Then we can get on to the next hot item - bring print quotas to iPad printing.... Cheers, Chris Developer @ PaperCut

I'm one of the developers at PaperCut. Yes. Please always do feel free to email us. Or if you can fit your request into 140 characters, tweet us :-) I've had a look at our svn commit logs and the "noquit" option was added in in version 8.3 back in 2008. For version's prior to this will only block users form quiting the client if the account selection popup is enabled (e.g. the client is "required" for printing). My recommendation would be to upgrade to version 10 (PaperCut NG Download). Version 7 is a little long in the tooth and has been EOL'ed. A quick way to enable the noquit option is to start the client out of your login script with the command-line option "--noquit". Full details of the client control options can be found here. Cheers Chris chris papercut.com Developer @ PaperCut

That's a smart move - just to remember to set the costs to a real amount when you need to go live with your print quotas again :-) If the date periods are known in advance then another option is to use PaperCut's Advanced Print Scripting. You could for example write a print script that sets the cost to zero for given conditions. For example, during a given a date range, the user's group, the printer selected, or a combination of factors. Scripts are written in JavaScript which makes it pretty easy. For example, here is a script I wrote to allow free printing during science lab class time. You could use this as a starting point. /* * Free printing during class time * * Members of the Students group get free printing to science lab printers * during lab time (2:00pm to 5:00pm Mondays). */ function printJobHook(inputs, actions) { var MONDAY = 1; // 0 = Sunday, 1 = Monday var day = inputs.job.date.getDay(); var hour = inputs.job.date.getHours(); if (day == MONDAY && (hour >= 14 && hour < 17) && inputs.user.isInGroup("Students")) { /* * Confirm that the printing is class related. Make it look nice * with HTML formatting. */ var response = actions.client.promptYesNo( "Free printing is available for lab work only. " + "Is this printing course/lab related?" + ""); // If the user did not respond, cancel the job and exit the script. if (response == "TIMEOUT") { actions.log.debug("User did not response to lab work question."); actions.job.cancel(); return; } if (response == "YES") { // Set the job cost to zero actions.job.setCost(0.0); // Record the reason for free printing in the job comment. actions.job.addComment("Free science lab class printing."); } /* * For tracking only, we'll also record the name of any user that * is using the printers for non-course work. */ if (response == "NO") { actions.log.info("User '" + inputs.job.username + "' used the" + " science lab printer for non-lab work."); } } } There are also a number of other Script Recipes that work in a similar way. It's always best to start with one of these, however if you're a hard core coder, feel free to start out from scratch with the API reference! Hope this helps. PS: I think print scripting is the coolest feature in PaperCut, but then again I'd say that as I was one of the developers who worked on the feature Cheers, Chris Developer@PaperCut

I'm one of the developers at PaperCut. System requirements are always a hard question for us developers - mainly because computers seem to get faster by the week! I don't think you could purchase a computer these days that's too slow to run PaperCut. HDD space is a function of the amount of data (print logs) you will store. 10 years ago, this was an issue, but today, the smallest HDD would probably last the largest university 50 years! It's still good to know how much will be required as it tends to be more of an issue for backup planning. Matt has done a few graphs to help estimate disk growth over time. You can view these here: Appendix*E.*Capacity Planning The growth rate on average is around 8.5MB per 10,000 print jobs. Your average school (if there is such a thing!) should look at reserving around 10 to 20Mb per month. Hope this helps. Cheers, Chris Developer@PaperCut

No need. I'm a developer at PaperCut and I'll raise it at the next feature review meeting. It's a fair point. The software will give a 40-day warning and this nag screen links to tips (the KB article linked above), however after this period there is little information. The problem is many administrators miss this window as once PaperCut it set up there is often very little need to login. Software licensing should not get in your way - nothing more frustrating ... now if only I could figure out how to "uninstall" by MS Office license off my old laptop that got trashed so I can install it on my new replacement one :-) [edit] I thought of one more thing. Tom added a feature a while back where the system will automatically email you when any licensing "issues" are detected. Might be worth setting this up. It's under Options -> Notifications. More information here: http://www.papercut.com/products/ng/manual/ch-sys-mgmt-sys-nofications.html . PaperCut will need access to an SMTP server. [/edit] Cheers, Chris

Just a minor correction to this post. The best application for education/school is PaperCut NG. PaperCut ChargeBack is for business - mainly engineering firms that need to charge printing to one of thousands of project accounts. It has an advanced popup that facilitates keyword searching of these accounts. PaperCut NG on the other hand specifically designed for education (and is much cheaper than the prices linked to above!) The price list for PaperCut NG is here: PaperCut NG - Pricing & Licensing Cheers, Chris

I can't duplicate this. If you can post your code in full I'll take a look at it. Might be time to upgrade IE6 :-) We discussed converting the graphics used in the widgets to GIF for the next release to support IE6 however they contain an alpha channel so they can be conveniently overlayed on an existing web page of any color.

The "X" is caused by the jquery supersleight plugin not being able to load the 'x.gif' transparent shim. 1. Get a 1x1 px transparent gif shim, or download one from http://www.papercut.com/images/blank.gif 2a. Copy it to your web server root as 'x.gif' and put the following code in head of page displaying the widgets: src="http://jqueryjs.googlecode.com/files/jquery-1.3.2.min.js"> src="http://allinthehead.com/code/sleight/supersleight.plugin.js"> <br /> $(function() {<br /> $('body').supersleight();<br /> });<br /> 2b. If you can't put the shim in your web server root as 'x.gif' you can reference one on the PaperCut server with the following code (modify your server name as appropriate): src="http://jqueryjs.googlecode.com/files/jquery-1.3.2.min.js"> src="http://allinthehead.com/code/sleight/supersleight.plugin.js"> <br /> $(function() {<br /> $('body').supersleight( { shim:<br /> 'http://papercut-server:9191/css/pngHack/transparent.gif' } );<br /> });<br /> Cheers, Chris Developer @ PaperCut

I raised this problem with Tom, our HTML guru. His first response was to suggest to upgrade away from IE6 as quick as possible He said another method is to use a JQuery plugin and try the following code: <br /> $(function() {<br /> $('body').supersleight();<br /> });<br /> You might want to download those scripts rather than hotlinking. Website describing plugin: http://allinthehead.com/retro/338/supersleight-jquery-plugin . The other option is to not use the stylec widgets but instead build your own layout using the AJAX data directly. There is an example of this in "Option B" in: ~papercut/server/examples/webwidgets/examples.html I've listed the layout issue in our bug database and it will get some attention fixed in a future release. Cheers, Chris Developer @ PaperCut

I'll have a chat to sales. I'm sure I can arrange something. Email me at chris a> papercut dot. com and I'll email through a discount code. Actually I probably could arrange a discount code for any EduGeek with a good thanked-to-post ratio Cheers, Chris Developer @ PaperCut

Hi Guys, Great work! I notice there is the dreaded IE 6 PNG alpha channel problem - aka "the gray border". Time for IE8 or even better upgrade to Firefox :-) I'll post a bug on this and see if we can fix it in the default PaperCut AJAX widgets. In the meantime you can use a CCS behavior trick to fix. Add the following to your CCS: img { /* IE PNG transparency hack */ behavior: url(http://papercut-server.myorg.org/css/pngHack/pngHack.htc); } Update papercut-server.myorg.org to point to the real server. Regarding access from outside the Intranet - the print quota/balance and environmental impact AJAX widgets should be resilient to this. They work by "replacing" the contents of a DIV element with data loaded off the server. If the JavaScript is unable to contact the server, the element will not be replaced. If not rendering the widget causes page layout issues, you could add a placeholder image inside the DIV block as follows: images/balance_not_avaliable.png Another technique I've seen used on some sites is to use ProxyPass/ModProxy in Apache to proxy requests through to the internal server on a given URL path - specifically only the URLs used by the widgets. I am however reluctant to recommend this method. mod_proxy is very powerful but also very easy to stuff up. If miss configured you may end up exposing more than you planed, or even worse, I've seen one site accidentally turn their Apache server into a open proxy by accident! Good for Twitter uses in Iran but not good for the bandwidth bill :-) Once you have the Moddle block fully working, let me know as I'd love to post it on the PaperCut Knowledge Base. Moddle is becoming more and more popular in education and I'd love to spread the word. Cheers, Chris Developer at PaperCut

If you require IPP authentication, instead of using the "papercut" user I'd recommend adding a new user account on the system with a name like "student" and set the shell to /bin/false . That way you'll prevent the password from being used for a remote login (i.e. SSH).