We’re happy to announce version 9.0 of PaperCut, a milestone and our 10th year anniversary release. As most would know, we have a release often policy and add many new features in minor point releases, although we do like to throw in at least one exciting new feature in a major release. Version 9.0 is no exception and includes plenty of new festive season goodies including find me printing, load balancing, and toner level detection and alerts.

Many of these features will benefit sites with large printer fleets. The toner level detection and alert feature will help schedule printer supplies purchasing and avoid getting caught off guard with no toner left in the printer. Nothing makes life easier than a friendly reminder email in your inbox!

Load balancing can be used to distribute the workload amongst a set of identical printers located in the same room, helping reduce turnaround time and distributing wear and tear among the print fleet.

The new find me printing feature is ideal for organizations currently utilizing print release stations. It solves many of the problems of printer selection. Instead of the user having to select the printer at the time of print, they can print to a single general global queue instead. When the job is released at the release station the system will automatically select the closest most appropriate printer. No more need to understand cryptic printer naming conventions, just find the closest printer and your job will find you!

These major features are also complemented with our usual smaller but no less important additions including support for new printer models and printing languages, new reports and report settings. Version 9.0 also lives up to our commitment of cross platform support. With Novell recently joining the ranks of officially supported platforms, PaperCut now works equally well on all four major server operating environments.

Version 9.0 is currently in release candidate mode, meaning customers are invited to download and evaluate the application in their environment and run testing scenarios according to their needs. The official release is scheduled for the week starting January 5th. System administrators looking to take advantage of some of the new features are advised to set aside some time for this upgrade.

(release candidate download links removed as the final release is now available)

In the meantime we’ll be working on 9.1 for which a number of features have been planned already. Stay tuned to this channel!