This is a good story but also a catch-22 for us! In some ways it’s a testament to the longevity of our programming, but on the other hand, we’d love to see sites upgrade more often

We have a very international customer base covering over 60 countries. It’s always nice to hear stories like this. If you’d like to share your story please email us at support.

Developing software for the world represents unique challenges. The most obvious challenge is ensuring that every facet of the application is translatable. PaperCut is already translated into over 15 languages which shows that we’ve done this bit right. You also need to make sure that you are 100% Unicode aware so that you can handle all characters, like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, etc. Again, PaperCut handles all this with ease.

But occasionally we encounter a problem or unexpected behaviour that only affects users in a particular region in the world. A few weeks ago we had one of these problems. In this case the user was reporting a problem where they were unable to run any PaperCut reports. We obtained debug logs that showed the error details, but even with this information we could not explain the problem. In the end it was the customer that helped find the problem. They reported that if they changed their “language” to “English” the reports worked, and if they changed the locale to “Turkish” the reports failed. Aha!! With that information we reproduced the problem.

I won’t go into all the gory technical details, but it turns out that the problem was that in Turkish the letter “i” when converted to uppercase becomes “İ” (unicode character 0×0130) which is an “I” with a dot above it. Some of our code has assumed that if you uppercased “i” it would become “I”, and when this didn’t occur the report failed to run.

As they say, you learn something every day. And we did! We learned that when dealing with text in different locales around the world … assume nothing.

We’ve now fixed this problem and this fix is now available in our 9.3 release. And with this release PaperCut is available to another large group of users. Prior to this Turkish users needed to run PaperCut under an English/US locale.

Now all we need is a Turkish translation. If you’d like to help translate PaperCut into Turkish (or any other language!!!) then let us know. We’d really appreciate your help.

The programmers here at PaperCut all write print management software for a day job, but have varied and often somewhat eccentric hobbies out of hours. I’d like to share with you one of my recent discoveries: all-grain brewing. I’d hazard a guess that home brewers are disproportionately represented amongst all you techies and readers of this blog, so hopefully you’ll find this interesting.

As an engineer and lover of beer it was inevitable that one day I would pose myself the question, “how does this beer stuff work and how can I make it?”. I’d been put off for many years because the only home-brew I’d heard about was to brew from extract. In summary, extract brewing means:

• Buy a kit from the supermarket. A kit usually has malt extract, hops and dry yeast.
• Boil the malt extract with water and the hops.
• Put the result into a fermentor with the yeast.
• Put the result into bottles with some sugar.

Well that’s easy enough, but it’s not exactly an art form. How can you change the flavour of the beer? By choosing a different kit, and maybe by varying the boil or amount of hops used. That’s why extract brewing was completely disinteresting to me. The value proposition seems to be that you can make beer cheaper than you can buy it, which is really only because you don’t have to pay alcohol tax to drink your own home-brew. To me it was like trying to be a handyman by building Ikea flatpacks.

Then I discovered all-grain brewing. Not only is all-grain brewing possible to do at home, it’s actually quite easy and doesn’t require much additional equipment. Rather than using malt extract all-grain brewing involves starting with malted grains (a sack of grain, available at brew shops) and extracting the sugars yourself. This is “real brewing”, and allows you to take on any style of beer you can think of by varying the malts, water, hops, yeast, sugars and other additions.

One site that was a fantastic guide for me while learning about brewing was the aptly named howtobrew.com. This covers a lot of the theory behind brewing, as well as guides for building some of the specialised equipment.

from howtobrew.com’s instructions for building a piece of brewing equipment: a mash/lauter tun and manifold

For the first batch my brewing partner and I decided to start with a beer that would require as little “modification” as possible. When extracting sugars from malt the water quality is a big factor. Basically: the harder the water, the darker the beer. This is why Dublin, with its very hard water, is known for its dark stouts, and Pilsen, with its very pure/soft water, is known for light coloured beers (and the Pilsner style). Melbourne’s water is about as pure as it is in Pilsen, so we settled on a Pilsner.

The one thing we didn’t count on was fermentation temperature. A Pilsner beer calls for a lager yeast, which ferments best at around 9°C (48°F). This might not be a problem in Pilsen, but in Melbourne that’s almost impossible without refrigeration (unless you want to leave it outside in the winter, in which case you’d risk freezing it). Ale yeasts on the other hand call for a temperature of around 20°C (68°F), which is much more achievable. So the result was a “Pilsner ale”. Not exactly a recognised style, but that’s part of the fun.

We couldn’t have been happier with our first all-grain batch. It’s encouraged us to learn more about the details (and there is a lot to learn) and to try other styles of beer. Fermenting now: a strong Scottish ale.

If you’ve got some brewing experiences to share I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

Offering good support is a balancing act - a compromise. How much developer time should we allocate to support? Being software developers (a.k.a. Tech Geeks), we’ve always wondered how we can measure this balance. I then had an idea… In the last “Vote for a Feature” survey I decided to add the following question:

PaperCut’s support is done direct by the development team. Should the developers allocate more time to supporting customers, more time to development, or do we have the mix about right?

[a range to select]

It’s a bit of a loaded question and hence the results needs to be taken with a grain of salt, but still is sure to give us some level quantitative feedback (and the sample size is now large enough to pass a significance test, just to bring back bad memories for those of us that did Stats101 :-).

With over 20,000 organizations running PaperCut, our surveys collects a lot of data. I started crunching the figures so I could email the results around to our development team, but half way through I had an idea. I could do one better. How about a real-time graph for the world to view! Anyway, after a late night playing around with some Google Docs APIs I’ve come up with a solution.

The gauge below represents the current real-time results of the survey data:

• If the gauge is at the top in the green range, we have the mix right.
• If it leans to the right (positive), our users are suggesting that we should spend more effort on new development and a little less on support.
• If it leans to the left (negative), we should spend more effort on support and and a little less on new development.

You’ll need a modern SVG enabled browser (e.g. Firefox) to view.

The gauge above is live. As of 27th of March, it’s at 4.76% suggesting we have the mix right. If you think the gauge should be leaning one way or the other, make sure you log in and express your vote! Anyway, too much time playing… back to adding new features to our print management software as the gauge currently suggests!

The survey results are sent through to the development team in real-time and are discussed at our feature review meetings. Please take a few moments to full it out and let us know what you think!

(click on a thumbnails to view)

I should also point out that this is 4 hours for a quality response - not an email from someone in an outsourced call center letting you know that “Your support issue has been elevated” and you end up getting a real response days or even weeks later. All our support is done by the developers that write the code. This offers a number of advantages to you and to us:

• You get the correct answer first time. No buck passing, no question is too hard.
• We, as developers, benefit from direct contact with our users. This open channel helps us turn your ideas into features faster (or your bugs into fixes faster!).

One of the downsides to this approach however is that trivial support questions get a bit annoying. Us developers love working on the hard problems, especially the ones that force us into source code and debug logs. The trivial RTFM questions get a little frustrating at times! If you’re reading this blog, here are a few tips that would help us out:

• Always check the manual and search the knowledge base for answers. You’ll fine hundreds of common questions answered here.
• Make sure you review the reporting problems KB article and include the information requested in your email. Simple things like the full version number, and/or logs are always a great help.
• Try to put something interesting in the email support request! We love to hear little stories like how PaperCut helps you, what funny things have happened on your network over the years, or even simply what the weather is like in your end of the world! We’ve formed great friendships with many PaperCut users and it’s always fun to talk not just about computers and print management software.

Oh, and if you say you read our blog, you’re bound to get even better support

A New Tour
The first area is our new product tour. The old tour was getting a little crusty. It did not show off many of the new features we’ve added to PaperCut over the past few years. The new tour is a clean start, a new design and shows off what we feel are PaperCut’s best assets. Tom’s done some great work with CSS and jQuery to implement some interested lightbox effects when you click on the image thumbnails.

The ROI Calculator
The state of the economy is a hot topic at the moment so we thought’s we’d put together a tool to help you work out how much PaperCut will help you save. Unlike a lot of software, PaperCut actually saves you money (That’s a jibe at Microsoft as we all like to bash them from time to time ) The ROI Calculator will guide you through a series of questions and generate a series of charts and statistics to help you understand how much PaperCut will save over a 5 year period (return on investment). As you will all know we’re also all keen on the environmental stance of PaperCut, and the calculator will also project the environmental impact savings. We hope this will give system administrators one more tool to help convince management about PaperCut!

Matt’s done a great job on the ROI Calculator. It’s all implemented in client-side JavaScript. Even the chart generation is done in DHTML with some fancy DOM manipulation.

Next week we’re back on normal coding busy working away on the 9.3 release!

In “The Power of the Marginal” technology entrepreneur and writer Paul Graham writes about the competitive advantage of companies thus structured: “The needs of customers and the means of satisfying them are all in one head.” In practice that means that at PaperCut, the customer’s question about a printer that seems not to be supported and the resulting update to the software that is being delivered to them by email are not more than a few hours apart. Bigger features may take a few weeks but we don’t usually refuse any functionality that has been demanded by at least 5 or so of our customers. And while other software products will entertain you with messages like “Error 0×800051ef has occurred”, error messages in PaperCut come with a one-click button that will deliver detailed information directly onto the developer’s desk so that the problem can be pinned down on the spot and the answer emailed back to the customer.

This is also why I recommend our customers to subscribe to Upgrade Assurance, where at little additional cost to their license they get a first-row seat in this feedback loop and can focus on their actual work, knowing that their print accounting will be kept up-and-running for years to come.

I live in Portland, Oregon USA where green has been a hot topic for decades. Portland is a major hub for the timber industry. The people in this area have experienced the downside of ignoring the environment for economic gains. Throughout much of the 20th century clear cutting was the standard logging technique here. In the 80’s as the environmental impact became obvious, public lands were protected from clear cutting. In the following years the timber industry nearly collapsed as enforced protection of the forests worked its way through the economy. The loss was 2 fold – first the environment, then the local economy.

Things are better in Oregon now, the local economy is much less dependent on the timber industry, logging practices are more environmentally friendly, and green is definitely in. When I tell people about my new job at PaperCut and show them our Environmental Impact Gadget I almost always get a ‘cool’ or ‘wow’.

If you would like to try the gadget and you are running Windows Vista, send me an email and I will send you a link to the download. The gadget is a part of our print management software that is used throughout the world to reduce waste by applying print quotas and providing network managers with information that can be used to track printing resources.

I just wanted to let you know that PaperCut was a key component in our ITC Print Accounting team winning an IOWA (Improving Our Workplace) Award this past fall. Using the features in your product have allowed us to reduce our printing by about 3% per year vs. an anticipated 10-12% annual increase using our previous print accounting solution. In addition, we have opened up printing from wireless laptops, student dorm rooms, and off-campus locations with the use of release stations and client-based authentication, providing a much more convenient environment for our students, staff, and faculty. We’re looking forward to even more service enhancements with the new features available in PaperCut 9.

There is also a write up in The Daily Iowan. It’s nice to see some of our Environmental Impact figures making their way into people’s minds!

The deployment at University of Iowa is one of many very large deployments of PaperCut that were conducted through ‘08. Two other successful projects of note have been implementations at Miami Dade College (the largest college in the US with 260,000+ users!) and the region of Oslo in Norway that have deployed PaperCut on a single clustered server instance supporting almost 200 schools via a WAN. I hope to have some time next week to talk more about these larger projects as we’ve done some really cutting edge tech. work in the areas of clustering and asynchronous I/O to get scalability up to handle deployments of this size.

Oh! I also forgot to mention the team at Nevada State for their successful eco-aware implementation. Thanks to them for their comments about our friendly support too!