We’ve supported running PaperCut on clustered servers for two years now and have some very large installations utilizing this feature. These range from large corporate and finance institutions to universities supporting 50k+ users. Clustering allows PaperCut to push into these really large sites.

Over the past two years I have learned that clustering should be considered as an investment rather than a solution. Purchasing a larger hard drive to fix a storage capacity problem is a solution. Implementing clustering may also be a solution but it’s far more of an investment. The pay-off is often not immediate. The real benefits come when the unexpected occurs. A power supply meltdown would usually make a system administrator’s heart stop, however to a cluster administrator it brings a smile as they realize all their hard work just paid off

While on the topic of clustering, any organizations looking at implementing PaperCut on a clustered Linux setup should take a look at the notes the guys at Zen Consulting have put up. If you’re in Canada and looking for assistance in this area, I can highly recommend Ryan and his team as they’ve done a great job with some challenging installs.

Fire has recently affected two of our customers. The first event hit one of our largest customers (a prestigious American University who shall remain nameless to save embarrassment!) running PaperCut in a clustered server array. Equipment failure in the server room resulted in a fire that took down the cluster’s shared storage. Fortunately the database server was still intact and we had their quota system up and running on a temporary box within a few hours. The second event occurred at Heron Island Research Labs – our “smallest” and most isolated customer based on a tiny island off the cost of Queensland, Australia. The fire there devastated the research labs at the world-renowned facility.

Both events highlight the importance of backup for both big and small. Now is the time to check your PaperCut backups and ensure that the in-built backup feature is complimented with a good off-disk and off-site (and off-island!) backup policy.

Wow! A customer in China running PaperCut Quota 1.0 (released 3 December 1999) emailed us today asking about upgrading to PaperCut NG 7.3. It’s amazing to think that such an old version is still out there and going strong. 8 years in the software world is a lifetime. A lot has changed since version 1.0 but it’s satisfying to see that our old code still has legs today!

We all spend a lot of time talking about environmental issues here in the office. I suppose partly because global warming is the “topic of the month” (really century!), and because we work on software designed initially with an environmental objective – that is cutting down on paper!

We find that PaperCut helps reduce an organization’s printing volume in a number of ways:

1. Monitoring: If users know they are being monitored and compared to other users, they tend to change their behavior.
2. Restrictions: Quotas, budgets, and limits on documents sizes help to reduce usage by addressing extremes.
3. Cost: If users pay for printing out of their own pocket (say in schools), they tend to always think before they print!

The next release of PaperCut will include a 4th method – that is, appealing to the user’s environmental conscience. PaperCut will now provide the user with information about the environmental impact of their printing.

Users can now view their impact in real-time. The figures present the impact in a number of forms:

• Trees: The percentage of a tree (or trees) used to make the paper.
• Carbon: The amount of CO2 (green house gas equivalent) that was released in the process of manufacturing and delivering the paper.
• Energy: Represents the impact in terms of the equivalent impact of running a 60W bulb for a period of time.

This has been one of my pet projects for the past few days. We hope that most sites will leave this option enabled and by appealing to a user’s environmental conscience we can cut paper even further!

When I next have some spare time, I intend to add a 5th factor – appealing to the user’s competitive nature. We plan to implement a star based ranking system where the system will issue a star rating to each users. The hope is that in a school/college environment students may compete for a 5 star rating… time will tell.

Make sure you all upgrade to the latest PaperCut release and get into an environmental mode!

After a three month project, we’ve finally released PaperCut ChargeBack 7.0. This is a major release as we’ve based this release of the new PaperCut NG code base. This is a great moment for us developers as it means no more development work using legacy Microsoft development and database technologies. Us “techies” like using the latest stuff! It’s nice to finally have PaperCut ChargeBack up to the same level as NG. The new release also introduces a load of new features so make sure you check out the product tour, upgrade and make your bill back procedures simpler!

While talking about PaperCut ChargeBack, we have also announced the end-of-life of some legacy versions of PaperCut ChargeBack. You can read more about this here.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case it’s worth 300,000 lines of source code! One of the questions we regularly get is, “Is PaperCut under active development? We need to ensure that the system we’re investing is moving with the times.” This is a valid question and a very important consideration for any software application that’s going to form an import part of your infrastructure. Most of our innovative development is focused on PaperCut NG and the product’s release history is a good testament to the rate of development.

Another measure of pace of evolution can be seen in the graph below.

This graph was produce by statsvn using statistics from our source code management system. It only includes source code from PaperCut NG (excludes PaperCut Quota or PaperCut Charge), but it does clearly demonstrate a rapid upwards trend with no signs of slowing!

After 6 months of testing we’ve declared the Mac Server version final and coordinated this announcement with our version 7.0 release. I’d like to quickly thank all the organizations that assisted us with testing and provided feedback during the testing program.

The testing program generated a long list of feature requests. These were prioritized with “bugfixes” taking the front seat with most of them completed prior to the 7.0 release. Many of the non critical feature requests are still pending. Now we have the final release out the door we can start on many of these. Some of the feature to expect over the coming weeks/months will include client improvements, a special installer to assist with Mac laptop deployments, and improved popup authentication with login hook integration.

Once again, thanks to all the people who provided feedback. Please contact me if any of you have not already take advantage of the 50% testers discount.

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the Mac Managers meeting at Utah University last week. This coincided nicely with the preparation for our 7.0 release.

The presentation is now hosted online in QuickTime format. I’d encourage any Mac system administrators interesting in print control, cross-platform development and our Mac development in general, to head over and take a look – duration approx. 25 min.