I’ve just written a quick KB article explaining how to keep PaperCut running trouble free. PaperCut has been around since 1999 and has proven to be a robust and reliable system. Most of the problems that come about are generally related to system or network changes (us technical people just can’t resist “fiddling” when everything is running fine!). The KB article details some of the problems experienced by our customers over the years, and how you to avoid them on your own network.

See http://kb.papercutsoftware.com/Main/KeepingAHealthySystem

PaperCut Software Pty. Ltd. has decided to start making annual donations to a number of open source or community projects. We use a number of open source tools here at PaperCut Software to build our software and run our networks. Some examples include:

• Inno Setup - used to build PaperCut’s installer
• Apache - to run our web server
• Debian Linux - to run some of our in-house and web servers
• Python - a programming language used to script some parts of our build/compile process

Today we decided to make a donation to the Jordan Russell, the developer of the Inno Setup project. Jordan has kindly listed our name of the official website as a major sponsor. We hope our donation continues to assist Jordan with making Inno Setup an even better application.

I know many our customers like reading our blogs (mine and Matt’s). How about having a chat with us online. You can catch Matt and I online with our “live chat” feature for about 10 hours in every weekday. Next time you have a technical question, catch us online and get an answer instantly. Even you don’t have a technical question, feel free to us it to catch about PaperCut in general.

See the contact us page for the “live chat” button. The page also includes the local time and the hours we’re usually online.

Chat with you soon!

We’re just uploading the final 5.2 build of both PaperCut Quota and PaperCut ChargeBack now. It’s been out in “preview release” format for a month, and with the help of a number of customers, we have tracked down and squashed any remaining bugs. Most of the report bugs were minor - an alignment issue here, a spelling mistake there. There was however one “killer bug” that slipped through our internal testing. It turned out that if a user selected a particular set of page dimension settings in Microsoft Word, the PaperCut system service would enter an infinite loop consuming 100% CPU. It showed up on some of the large test sites after a few hundred print jobs or so. Anyway, all will be happy to know we have fixed this bug in the official 5.2 release!

Once again, thanks to all who assisted with testing, “bug squashing”, and of course all the customers that contributed their thoughts on what features we should include.

Next week, I’ll write something about how to deploy the User Inquiry Tool using a “zero-install” methods.