TSheward_MM

Really appreciate the input, thoughts and DM; will throw some info back in chat. We are an education facility with limited tech needs which is why the punt was taken on hive This is a Sharp<>Papercut specific thing and schools running other hardware obviously haven't been burnt as such but I guess the elephant in the room is rollback strategy when a bug like this is introduced which will apply to all OEMs not just Sharp. There's parts I really like and have been very impressed by, other bits not so much; maybe a stronger uservoice/community might be worth considering while hive is at early adopter stage as you say...

Hi all, Seems to be a lot of people asking about hive but few responses so thought I would share our experience with hive. We proof of concepted back in June/July and seemed to be very simple to get up and running (which it is); interface (embedded Sharp) seemed pretty sluggish, not enough to be unusable but functionally it worked fine. Supplier said the interface would be quicker the more nodes that were on site (from our experience this turns out not to be true, there is no difference in speed should you have 3 nodes connected or 250 nodes connected). The rest of the system seemed as it is on the tin, a product born in the cloud in its infancy; super stripped down feature set that wouldn't be appropriate for 90% of schools. The only reason it would work here is because this is a very small, pretty laid back school in all honesty who didn't have any form of managed print/secure release previously. Long story short, between PoC and when our photocopiers were replaced (complete with hive) some kind of bug was introduced with Sharp and Papercut and it takes over a minute from releasing your job to it being sent to the printer; you can photocopy 300 pages faster than you can get a few single page documents released. Knowing what was liaised with papercut support, I'd say they knew about and were working on the issue for well over a week, more like two, before updating their known errors pages on their site (complete with a workaround that doesn't work). It's been another two weeks of being fed the line "it's with Papercut and Sharp Japan" with no indication of any progress or eta for a fix. Doesn't seem like they are able to roll back nodes or embedded apps to a version that actually works so a month in, it's more lines of staff and students at the photocopiers for the foreseeable future; how we don't have a mob with pitchforks at the door I don't know. For those of you used to any form of functional print management, you know hive isn't fit for your school already. For those with light print requirements who think their school is only doing the bare minimum equivalent of a small business so maybe just maybe hive will be able to do the job... probs best to still stay clear. Oh and the whole cloud only thing, you need at least 3 always available static IP machines on site for the whole thing to work; papercut say you can use a VM, supplier said they issued an update saying don't use a VM Verdict; if you want papercut and want cloud, spin up a VM in Azure/AWS and stick MF on it.

Small independent, catholic, international girls day and boarding school undergoing digital transformation with big focus on cloud, very exciting time to join. Email [email protected] with any questions or reply to this thread. Careers - Marymount International School London (marymountlondon.com)