PaperCut Blog / News

It’s been nearly two months since our last minor point release which is a long time between drinks for PaperCut.  We’ve become used to churning our releases on an almost monthly basis so you can imagine the chaos in the team when we didn’t release on schedule! For those that are not aware, Daylight Savings ended in Melbourne where our head office is located and like the confusion that comes with losing or gaining an hour in a day, the same confusion reigns when we wind back our development cycle…

Switching the clocks back for daylight savings time

On the topic of Daylight Savings, this year’s changeover was somewhat like a mini Y2K for PaperCut as we encountered a new issue for countries switching their clocks at 1:00AM… As it turns out, many businesses print audit reports were scheduled to run between 1:00-2:00AM and with Daylight Savings pushing clocks forward one hour in this particular region, 1:00-2:00AM never existed and thus the reports never ran!  Luckily our skilled team was on the case first thing Monday morning and had it fixed within minutes (even though they had a whole year to wait for in-field testing)

With loads of the usual enhancements, fixes and updates we normally pack into the release again there is surely something for everyone in 11.2.  The most notable new enhancement released within 11.2 is the ability to now output details of a user’s department and office history.  E.g. If a user switches department midway through a month, print audit reports showing activity by department will now account for their activity in the old department for the first half of the month and the new department for the second half.

To see a full list of the changes and enhancements made to this release, please check our release history which details every change for this and previous releases.

Image “119: Daylight Savings Time” by niseag03 / CC BY-ND

Flooding in Melbourne streets

We’ve had lots of great feedback about the dashboard and the new look interface – thanks to everyone who emailed in. Much to the delight of our support team the version 11.0 release last month went down smoothly and there were no major issues reported. If you’ve been holding off on the upgrade because you don’t like “dot zero” releases there is no excuse now!

Among the many little enhancements in this release we’ve expanded our watermarking support across a greater range of PCL6 printer drivers.

The full list of changes can be found in the release history. Happy downloading!

Flood image by Looking Glass / CC BY

It’s January 2011, and we’re excited to announce the release of our latest version of PaperCut – Version 11 (or is that XI?). If you’re an existing PaperCut user then two things will be immediately obvious:

1. A new & improved look and feel
2. The addition of a new tab – Dashboard!

The new look and feel is the result of a design contest that was held recently to refresh the appearance of the administration console, as those who follow us on Twitter would be well aware of.  While the previous design wasn’t exactly “old” (it’s web based – lifespan is measured in days & hours!), we felt it was time to refresh and revitalise the appearance to give it a new lease on life.

To coincide with the recent redesign of our website we wanted to bring some of the new look & feel we implemented into our application… or at least add a few rounded corners and gradients . We hope you agree that the results are a greatly improved appearance which is far easier on the eyes.

The new Dashboard tab is now the first tab displayed when you log into the administration interface.  The Dashboard provides an overview of all system activity and the current status of all your devices and users.

In the v11 release we have included seven new dashboard gadgets:

• The System Status gadget provides system statistics such as uptime, active users, jobs today and system warnings.
• The Pages Printed graph helps you track printing volume over the last 30 days.
• The Printer Status gadget is ideal for an “at a glance” view of your print fleet. It displays pages printed today and device information such as toner levels and paper jams.
• The Real-time Activity gadget lets you see what’s happening right now in real-time. It shows events like print jobs arriving, users logging in, exceeding print quotas, print job status and much more. This tool has been designed specifically to help you monitor activity and diagnose problems.
• The What’s Next? gadget offers tips for for first-time users .
• The Environmental Impact gadget displays overall environmental impact statistics at a glance.
• The News gadget ensures you’re kept up to date with relevant release and development activity at PaperCut.

Future releases will allow you to extend the dashboard with additional gadgets as well as providing the ability to add, remove and re-arrange the display.  If you have any ideas or suggestions for new gadgets, then let us know by completing our “Vote for a Feature” form in Administration console -> About -> Product News.

The full list of changes in this release can be found on the release history page.

PaperCut Version 11.0 is a new major version, in line with our commitment outlined in our December-January period for new major version releases. If you have a current subscription to our premium upgrade assurance plan you may upgrade to version 11 at no additional cost. For our other customers please see our upgrade policy to determine if you are eligible for a free upgrade. Once-off upgrades may be purchased via our online order system. Upgrading now will entitle you to all the releases in the 11.x series throughout the year.

We hope you enjoy this release, and we look forward to hearing what you think about it!

In the current round of our vote for a feature survey we were seeing one feature mentioned often: the ability to easily restrict who can perform color printing by group. This brought up an interesting discussion in our team meeting. “Yeah, how do you do that?”. There are actually several possible ways to do it, such as using a printer script, or setting up one print queue for color and another for grayscale. But the key part was how to easily set this up. Turns out there was no easy way.

So along with out latest release, PaperCut 10.7, we have made it easy:

One of the great things about getting your feedback from our feature voting is that you help us decide what the important things are, from the minor tweaks to the major features. Often we have our heads down working on the big new features like watermarking, print scripting and Web Print, when making some quick changes to the basic features would be equally as effective towards making sure we have the best print management software.

Thanks for letting us know what you want! The voting is still open, so there is still time to tell us your wishlist if you haven’t had the chance yet.

Also in this release is watermarking support for PCL5 drivers. With our existing watermarking support for PostScript, this checks off two thirds of the major print driver languages. Coming soon: watermarking for PCL6 drivers.

There are also new reports for comparing printing between two time periods (e.g. last month to this month), and many minor improvements.

Full release history

If you take a look though the historical release history for PaperCut you’ll notice that our minor version releases tend to alternate between “several big new features” and “lots of little improvements”. After the watermarking and multiple personal accounts features added in 10.5 (amongst others), this release falls into the latter category. While we could always just constantly add big new features, these small changes (many based on your valuable feedback!) are what keeps PaperCut feeling polished, reliable and easy to use.

Standing out from the full list of changes are:

A default shared account may now be configured per-user. This represents the user’s most commonly used account, and can be useful for users who mostly charge to the same account, but occasionally need access to others. The default shared account is automatically selected for the user when they print.

A user's default shared account is automatically selected for them when they print

Large organizations with more than one user directory (e.g. a new Microsoft Active Directory and a legacy LDAP server with users that have not been migrated) can now synchronize, import and authenticate against both at the same time.

A user's default shared account is automatically selected for them when they print

We also recently had a few adventurous customers installing PaperCut on Windows Server Core, and thanks to their assistance this release now runs on Windows 2008 Server Core out of the box, including install documentation. Those with experience on Server Core will know how bare bones it is

Download, install, enjoy!