Ye Olde Support System has been archived for posterity

I sometimes find myself sitting on the fence between ‘customer’ and ‘technical support’. It was not that long ago I was an IT manager for a reasonable size high school here in Melbourne, Australia. One thing that was always on my mind was the quality and timeliness of support available from software and hardware vendors. It was no good getting fast support that didn’t resolve my issue and nor was it useful having accurate support that took 5 working days to get back to me. Good quality support is important!

Typically support ticketing at PaperCut has been managed by various different systems depending on the mode of contact (email, live web chat, or phone). We’ve grown rapidly over the past few years and now have tens-of-thousands of customers and hundreds of support emails a day. Our primary support system was a home grown set of Python scripts married with our mail system (exim). It’s served us well but we collectively decided it was time to look around…
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Where is that last piece?

Today in the busy PaperCut offices Peter was runing tests of his PCL6 print job watermarking feature over our corpus of test documents. This involves quite a bit of printing and unfortunately we suffered a rather nasty paperjam. The first few attempts by us to remove the paperjam did not have the best results.

Then my System Administrator brain kicked in and I remembered two simple tricks that I thought I would share with everyone.

1) Be Thorough!
When you have a difficult to remove paper jam in your device, keep all of the pieces of paper as you pull them out. Reassemble it like a puzzle. If you don’t have a complete page you have missed something!

By doing this we could tell that there was a remaining tiny piece of paper, somewhere deep in the paper path of our copier.

2) Use what’s at hand.
That tiny piece of paper was no where to be seen. We could see where the paper was jaming but couldn’t see inside to remove it. Most of the time, fixing this is going to require either calling in a repair tech (if under warranty / service agreement) or pulling the entire thing apart.

What I’ve learnt is that using 150-200GSM paper and manually feeding it through the paper path by hand can often dislodge the offending piece. If I don’t have a piece of heavy weight card around I can simply fold an A4/Letter piece of paper in half, length wise, and feed that through. This tip has saved me many hours and more than a few dollars worth of service calls, not to mention my sanity!

That reminds me, when I sat back down at my desk an my PaperCut installation had notified me that the print was in error. Have YOU setup your PaperCut system notifications? These notifications can inform you of low toner issues, paperjams and much more.

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!

Hello, my name is Jason and I’m the new member of the PaperCut team. In my previous position I was a Systems Administrator (SysAdmin) at a leading high school. It though I’d share my story about PaperCut from my last role.

Part of any SysAdmin job is finding technology that fits a business need and in more recent times, a budget! Far gone are the days of unlimited budgets and unaccountability. There is now pressure on SysAdmins to quantify how a new piece of technology is going improve the bottom line.

One of perhaps the most costly areas of a SysAdmins responsibility is printing: hardware, consumables and time! The impact on a organization when a printer breaks down can often be heard office wide! “WHY is this printer out of paper AGAIN?”

Maybe this printer is being utilised by a department that should have their own printer, or maybe we need an extra couple of paper bins so that it only needs to be refilled in the morning, or perhaps someone is even doing printing outside of business hours. We often just don’t know.

Having been both a SysAdmin and as an Employee, I understand the frustration on both sides. In my past position I decided to investigate some print management software and see what kind of results I could achieve. So off to Google I went and after a bit of research PaperCut NG was the top candidate. I downloaded the trial and installed it to my test environment. It worked. I threw print jobs at it, I threw weird configurations at it. It just worked and I wanted it installed as soon as possible. I could see the immediate benefit.

I spoke to my manager, praising the features of the software and expecting an easy path to purchase. Unfortunately the budget was tight and it would need to be considered and justified. At this point I realized that the information I had did not quantify how this software would improve our bottom line. I needed to present my case to the budget holders!

I went back to PaperCut and discovered the ROI Calculator (Return on Investment). I started putting in some figures: 2,000 students, 250 staff, $0.05 a mono page, $0.20 per color page, checked with Accounts Department again to see how much paper we were using (about 8 reams a day, 4,000 pages). With all of these figures in, the numbers that came back were staggering. What was even more of a stand out was the time it would take for the purchase of the PaperCut software to pay for it self. It was possible that inside of 3 months we would be ahead.

Armed with more information I arranged another meeting. Using the bar graph, dollar values, and environmental impact, I put forward my more polished case. Everyone was sitting there asking “Do we really use this much paper? Do we really spend this much?”. The questions now weren’t about how much it was going to cost. Instead it had created a catalyst whereby the questions were about “Where else can we streamline ? What other software should we be looking at? Are there other faculties that can benefit?”. PaperCut was was now over the line, it was a now a no-brainer for everyone. The only downside is there was now an expectation that I go repeat the savings in other areas!

I’m now proud to be part of the PaperCut team working with a bit of software that I know from first hand experience has a real positive impact.

A little while ago I made a short post about a Vote for a Feature survey that we’re conducting. This survey is designed to gather feedback from PaperCut users regarding some of the smaller features that they would like to see added. The response has been fantastic and also very thorough. Many of our customers have taken the time to answer the ‘Scratch an Itch’ question!

Most importantly though is that with the release of version 10.3 we have added one of the popularly requested features, namely the ability to edit scheduled reports – currently sitting in the “top three” as shown in the graph below. (Standings as of Tuesday 18th of May, 2010)

Over the next few months we’ll be working to address many of the other highly requested Scratch an Itch features. In the meantime, if you’d like to have your say, make sure you take the time to record your vote.

Welcome to the first 2010 PaperCut Vote for a Feature!

After the fantastic success we had we our last vote for a feature we’re going for another round! Our last Vote for a Feature Survey focused on Big Ticket items. This time we’re evaluating the “smaller items” that can have a big impact – the small little things that can help make your life easier as an administrator/user. The goal of this round of voting is to determine type of small features help out the most.

You can access the latest Vote for a Feature survey via:

• Administration console -> About -> Product News.

PaperCut is considering sponsoring a public mailing list enabling all users to share ideas and innovative print management practices with each other. If you are interested in this please enter your email into the space provided in the survey.