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Monthly Archives: August 2010
PaperCut Version 10.5 Released
It’s been two months since our last release. One of the longest gaps we’ve had between releases for a long while. This is however to be expected as this is our largest release yet! It’s also one of our most innovative, pushing new ideas and concepts. This release contains many big ticket items voted for in the last few rounds of voting:
- Watermarking and job attribution
- Document digital signatures
- Print policy popups
- Multiple personal accounts
- New printing impact desktop widget
- … and much much more.
New & noteworthy in this release:
Watermarking, Job Attribution and Digital Signatures
Adding text such as a user name to the bottom of a page in a print job was one of our most voted for features through 2009 and 2010. We’ve taken this request and added some of our own innovative ideas to create the new watermarking and job attribution feature. It is now possible to add dynamically constructed text to the bottom of each page (e.g. username), set different font sizes, gray-level and position on page.
We’ve also extended the watermark to include support for digital signatures using a cryptographic HMAC based on SHA1 or MD5. Every document may have a unique signature which can be used to verify the origin and author of any print job. We’ve gathered feedback from a number of our larger corporate and government customers to design this feature and are very excited about the new document tracking possibilities it opens. Our view is that print management software should more than just tracking & reporting and we’re working hard to innovate is all areas.
Watermarking is currently listed as an experimental feature and currently only supports PostScript printers. Peter is working on PCL support and this is targeted for a subsequent release.
Print Policy
Print scripting now includes a standard corporate print policy recipe. This allows organizations to implement a print policy where:
- users are reminded via a popup to print duplex (and must opt-in to print simplex)
- printing emails is discouraged
- printing web pages in color is discouraged
Multiple Personal Accounts
Users can now have more than one personal account. At a simple level, this can be used in education environments to separate free print quotas from cash payments, for example, allowing simpler management and reporting. At a more advanced level, multiple personal accounts can be combined with print scripting to allow different departments to manage their own pot of funds and determine on which devices this pot can be used. This feature has been developed in conjunction with Cambridge University in the UK with the aim of satisfying their complex inter-college and inter-department environment.
Multiple Personal Accounts - ideal for higher education
Ad hoc bulk user actions
Ad hoc bulk user actions has been one of the top voted for features for the past few months. Priyanka has done a great job and she’s worked had to get this into this release.
A new environmental impact desktop widget
We’ve worked with Do Something, the non-profit organization supporting the Paper-Less Alliance, to bring this innovative desktop widget to PaperCut (see screenshot above). The aim of this widget is to help organizations reduce paper by arming users with information. Users can also benchmark their use against the organization average. You can download the widget here.
The widget is also used a fund-raiser. Organizations looking at deploying this widget are encouraged to make a donation of $0.99 per user with all proceeds going through to Do Something to help implement paper saving and environmental initiatives.
Re-sending data after connection failure
We’ve added new code to handle exceptional cases such as network connections failing between servers – for example when PaperCut is used over a WAN. If the connection temporarily fails, PaperCut can now be configured to locally record transactions and re-send them across when the connection comes back up. Read more here.
We hope you enjoy the bag full of new features. We love hearing your feedback so if you have any comments or suggestions please do let us know. For the full list of changes see the release history and get your downloads here. We’ll keep you posted about features for the next release on our blog and twitter feeds.
Posted in General, Releases
4 Comments
Five Secret Power Features
Power Features!
It is difficult to predict which of the many features will become the most popular, but I would like to share with you my personal list of secret power features. These are feature that are off the beaten track, but are received with great enthusiasm when I explain them to customers. Many of the features are not new, but provide critical functionality for a site once they are discovered and implemented.
- PaperCut can stay synchronized with the Office and Department fields in Active Directory or LDAP allowing you to create reports to compare printing within or between offices and departments such as the Department printing – job type summary report.
- Administrators can receive automatic email alerts on printer error conditions that contain information including the error type (e.g paper jam, toner low), time that the error was first reported, location and number of jobs in the queue. Here is a link to the manual section that covers System Notifications.
- Print Scripting was introduced earlier this year and has had many “Recipes” and “Snippets” added over the last few months. Scripts can be used to provide precise control of print job handling including configuring PaperCut to perform least-cost-routing, print job redirection, and environmental warnings based on Group, job size, time of day and many other criteria. Maybe you wish to remind people to print duplex/double-sided or even stop printing of emails. This level of print management (print policy control) is all possible! From the Admin Console select the Printer tab then select a test printer or the Template Printer. Select the Scripting tab then the “Import Recipe” or “Import Snippet…” button to get a list of pre-built script and segments. There is also a summery of pre-build recipes at the bottom of this page.
- Web Print allows unauthenticated laptop computers that do not have drivers for your network printers to upload PDF and Microsoft Office documents to the PaperCut server where they can be printed and tracked to the user’s PaperCut account. This feature has extended the campus print infrastructure to include student laptops in dorms and other wireless access areas. You can even allow students to select the destination printer from a map, floor plan or site plan.
- There is a version of PaperCut that is available from resellers and Authorized Solution Centers (approved resellers) that can track off the glass copy, fax and scan images using embedded software that connects the multi-function device to the PaperCut Admin Console for consolidated control and reporting with the network printers. In addition, PaperCut MF can use multi-function devices as Release Stations for network printing in a secure printing or find-me printing configuration. Other hardware devices such as Pay Stations can also be integrated with PaperCut MF.
Feel free to comment with any of your own favorite power features.
Image courtesy of schani on flickr
Posted in General, PaperCut Tips
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Quick update on pending 10.5 release
Just a minute!
Watermarking:
The ability to add some text to the bottom of every page printed. This text is configurable in terms of content, font-size and color. Typical uses include:
- adding student names or student numbers to the bottom of their print jobs
- writing job metadata in the footer such as print time, printer, document name, etc.
- add a digital signature (SHA1 or MD5 HMAC) to all pages allowing you to track documents and verify authenticity/originality/source.
Multiple Personal Accounts:
It will now be possible for users to have more than one personal accounts. This feature has been developed in conjunction with Cambridge University in the UK. A typical use would be splitting student cash payments and free print quotas into separate buckets to make refund management easier. However in large organizations such as Cambridge it can be used, in conjunction with print scripting, to allow different departments/groups/colleges to manage their own print credits on their own printers.
Re-sending data after connection failure:
We’ve added new code to handle exceptional cases such as network connections failing between servers. For example say you have PaperCut installed on a business WAN with print servers spread across geographic regions. If the connection temporarily fails between offices, PaperCut can now be configured to locally record transactions and re-send them across when the connection comes back up.
All the three features listed above have been on the top of the vote list for many months. It will be great to have them released. And don’t forget that we’ll always include in many, many minor improvements and bug fixes.
We’re working hard to get the release out next week and will keep you posted on progress via our twitter feed.
Posted in Releases
5 Comments
25 Years of Digital Printing
A Printing Press
When counted by number of pages printed, most printing still takes place on printing presses like the one on the right.
The following table and pie chart, based on numbers from an American Printer article, show the state of the US printing industry in 2004.
Printing Industry by Segment
| Segment | Size ($US billion) |
| General commercial | 53 |
| Package printing | 38 |
| Specialty printing | 10.5 |
| Catalogs/directories | 10 |
| Forms/labels | 10.5 |
| Trade services | 12 |
| Newspaper | 15 |
| Direct mail | 8 |
| Inserts/coupons | 7 |
| Financial | 5 |
Within this slow-moving industry there have been dynamic pockets of rapid growth and the adoption of modern technologies for the last 25 years. One of these has been digital printing.
Chester Carlson
My employer was one of many small companies thriving in the market opened by the cheap Apple LaserWriter PostScript laser printer in 1985 and the cheap desktop publishing applications created by Apple, Adobe and other development companies. This market remains vibrant as work that was previously done in other parts of the printing industry moves to digital color printing and more corporate printing moves in house as office printers and office software becomes more capable. (There was a parallel and related trend of growth built around home computer printing and drop on demand (dod) inkjet technology but this post will focus on graphics and office printing.) A brief history of digital printing follows.
(more…)
Posted in General
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A quick tip to keeping a DHCP network organized
I was recently helping a customer with a couple of reporting questions they had and they mentioned that they were going to be rolling out 20 new printers in the near future. I commented that this would require quite a bit of work, lugging hardware around, changing printer drivers etc. They agreed and then said that the worst of it was setting the static IP addresses of all of the new devices.
Having had to manage rollouts of small to large sizes I’ve come across this problem before and luckily found two features of a Microsoft DHCP server that can save a lot of time.
DHCP Reservations
Ultimately there is no difference between a static IP address and a DHCP allocated IP address that doesn’t change. The results are the same, you connect to the IP address and the same device is there each and every time. This is essential for servers, switches, routers, printers and more. In many cases setting the device to use a static IP address is suitable and possibly even best practice (routers in large networks for example).
However, if you have a large number of devices that require non-changing IP addresses, why not set your DHCP server to always give out the same IP address each time the device turns on or refreshes its IP address? Simply open your DHCP management interface (I’ll assume Windows here) and navigate to your Scope and then Reservations. From here you can create new reservations and all you will need is the MAC address from the printer. For example: 00:1D:09:FE:64:04 is converted to 001D09FE6404 and given then IP address of 10.1.1.12. Set the printer to DHCP assigned address and give it a moment.
A couple of seconds later you should be able to communicate with the printer on the new IP address.
The benefits of this are quite easy to see, imagine if you had to send a printer to a remote office where there are no tech-savvy users. Grab the MAC address of the printer, create a new DHCP reservation, create the new print queue and share it out. When the printer gets out there, simply get someone to plug it in to power and network and you’re done.
If you replace the device (hardware does fail unfortunately), simply change the MAC address in the reservation then replace the old hardware. No fiddling with the interface panel on the printer required.
DHCP import/export
“That’s nice.” I hear you say, “But it doesn’t help with these 20 devices, I’m at the printer anyway, might as well do the time there.”
This is quite valid, except you can export/import DHCP settings via the command line enabling you to use your favourite spreadsheet program to manipulate the data.
Running the following command will give you a simple dump of the existing DHCP setup.
netsh dhcp server 192.168.0.1 dump > C:\Dhcp\Dhcpcfg.dmp
Inside you will see commands like:
dhcp server \\10.1.1.1 scope 10.1.1.0 add reservedip 10.1.1.12 001D09FE6404 "printer-library" "" "BOTH"
By adding “netsh ” to the start of those lines, you have a pre formatted script to add DHCP configuration settings.
Congratulations! You’ve now set a reserved IP.
If you wanted to get creative, you could export your existing DHCP reservations, load the file into Microsoft Excel, modify the MAC addresses for the relevant devices and re-import it to your DHCP server. 30 seconds per printer by this method, or several minutes standing at the print queue.
Remember, this is just for printing, there is no reason you can’t use this for new servers, printers, switches, access points, specialized desktops and more.
For more netsh DHCP commands see Microsoft’s TechNet website:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc787375(WS.10).aspx
For more information in general about netsh commands see Microsoft’s Help and Support website: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/242468
Hope this post is useful. Best-practice printer management on a large sites not just about PaperCut. It’s also about your network management practices!
Posted in General
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