The Melbourne Office Kanban

Steve, our Partner Alliance Manager joined us from Sydney on Tuesday. We spent most of the day flowcharting our sales and distribution channel partner strategy. That and the ever changing Melbourne weather gave me a headache that had me limping back to the hotel at the end of the day instead of socializing with the team as I had hoped to do. As I rested in my hotel room that night I wondered if the trip was going to be worth the expense and inconvenience. The following day was much better. Steve and I finished up the channel process flowchart, and I went out for beers with Tom, Hendrik, and Ian after work. Things were back on track.

On Thursday I watched the team go into action birthing release 11. 6, better known as the iPad Printing release. We don’t have pointy haired managers or project team meetings at PaperCut –instead we use the Kanban method of project management. For PaperCut that means pasting colored pieces of paper on a wall and moving them through stages starting with concept and ending with completion. Everyone on the team stood in a circle and each of us reported the progress of the previous day as the papers were moved from “Review” to ”Done”. The build was completed by Tom and Chris in the late evening hours in order to keep to our policy of not posting new releases on Friday.

Thursday night I went to an art museum opening with Hendrik and met several of his artist friends. I really enjoyed that. The experience kicked my creative juices into high gear. On Friday, I was able to finish the tasks that I had planned, and we all got together for the Friday Christmas dinner.

Saturday was my one play day in Melbourne. We spent the day in the Yarra Valley at Healesville Sanctuary, a beautiful wildlife park that houses some of Australia’s most interesting animals. We finished the outing with lunch at the Chandon Winery. I spent the evening dining with John and Christine the anchors of our Customer Service team. They keep the orders and licenses flowing to the resellers and customers in the 60 countries where PaperCut supplies print management solutions.

I had a great time overall and left with a few new insights that were not on my list of stated goals:

• Steve is still a rock star. Sure, he stopped touring years ago, but he doesn’t skip a beat synchronizing our development and operational teams with our business partners globally. That’s not an easy gig.
• I saw a different side of Hendrik. He introduced me to an eclectic group of artist, complete with a personal tour of the backroom of their gallery in downtown Melbourne. I wouldn’t have guessed that he had mates with such a different background. We had a great conversation about art and psychology over dinner that expanded my thinking, and my view of Hendrik.
• Face time is important. I experienced my team mates in a way that can’t be done via chat, email and phone calls. Thanks to everyone that invited me into their space and took time to share with me.
• Finally, my brief time with Chris helped me to focus on what I need to do to fulfill my role at PaperCut. My job is getting PaperCut into the hands of everyone in the Americas that can appreciate its benefits. The message that I took away from the meeting with Chris is summarized best in a quote that was shared with me by the traveler that sat next to me on the flight from Sydney to San Francisco:

Clearing your printing problems with PaperCut support

“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!”

Jason was an IT manager and a PaperCut customer in his former role. His firsthand experience on the receiving end of support has helped us to elevate the quality level of our support.

Since starting with PaperCut, one thing that has impressed me more than anything else has been that everyone here actually enjoys helping customers. To the developers and fellow techs, this is more than just a job that you clock in, muddle through a few calls, chats and emails, turn in your time card, and go home.

I chose quality support as the theme of my blog post because I want to make sure that everyone knows how to get the most out of this great resource. Here are a few tips:

First, which is the best method of contacting PaperCut technical support? It really depends what you need. For example, If you need general technical information, sales information, or are just curious about PaperCut’s capabilities, a phone call is probably best. However, if you’re looking for detailed technical information, then you would be better served by either using the Support Chat or emailing support@papercut.com. This way, when the tech you’re working with responds with the necessary technical information, it will be provided in a format that is easy to reference, complete with relevant knowledge base articles and technical instructions that would be difficult to retain if relayed over the phone. It also helps us techs get faster and better support from the developers.

When you contact PaperCut support, please include information regarding the systems related to the problem. Let us know the version of PaperCut, the OS on the server and workstations, which printers (make and model) are affected. If it was working previously, let us know about any changes made to the server/printer/workstation/etc. When we receive a support request from a user with that information, it usually cuts the resolution time significantly.

Lastly, PaperCut has a knowledge base, which is keyword searchable with a Google search tool! You will find it at the top of all PaperCut web pages. If you haven’t used our knowledge base, here are some articles that will help to get you started:

http://www.papercut.com/kb/Main/ReportingProblems

http://www.papercut.com/kb/Category/Troubleshooting

http://www.papercut.com/products/ng/manual/apdx-faq.html

Now entering my third month working with the people here at PaperCut, I’m amazed at how much I’ve learned and how much I still have to learn, but at least I’m beginning to pull my weight, and at least Chris hasn’t had a dart launcher placed on my desk for when I mess up… yet.

Diagram 1A

Every workplace has its own unique culture. It’s been about a month since I joined PaperCut, and I’d love to share an insight into the way we do things here.

My background is in design. For someone like me, going into a workplace where code is essentially the second language used is kinda like fighting an army of technological lions armed only with an HB Pencil. In fact, I regularly finding myself nodding unknowingly at the office talk of ‘JavaScript’ to which I respond with the bent finger of the philosoraptor; “what’s a java?”(refer to Diagram 1A. For the Gen-X’s in the company this is a Gen-Y internet meme) This usually generates a few laughs from my co-workers, although I fear the day they actually figure out that I seriously have no idea.

PaperCut is a fast growing company and it was inevitable that somebody with the same name as an existing developer was going to join the team at some point. Unfortunately that someone was me! I was quickly dubbed “tom2.0″ to avoid confusion, and the name has stuck.

I must admit the thought of my first blog post was daunting, so essentially I did what any other Gen-Y would; I copied someone else’s work off the interwebz. Luckily for me someone out there in the blogosphere recently interviewed us so half my work was done. We were interviewed by blogger Random IT Guy. He was looking for a glimpse behind the bright green curtain of PaperCut to see how we work as a company; we were more than happy to oblige. Here is an extract from the interview:

The folks down at PaperCut headquarters were nice enough to answer a few of my questions about their operations, as well as their products and initiatives.  Now that I have a glimpse into how they work, it’s no wonder they have a superb product. If you haven’t checked them out yet, see their site here.  Even if you don’t work in an enterprise IT setting, check out some of their free products here.

 

Q: What is the typical non-Friday day like at PaperCut headquarters?

A: You must be following our twitter feed! Non-Fridays are quite different from Fridays …more on that later. For us a typical day here in the Melbourne office is focused around two important core events. One is the 10:00am coffee run and the other is the 3:30pm coffee run! Coffee, along with print management is part of the culture here at PaperCut Software. As you’ll see from our blog, we’re all certified coffee baristas! Most of us have espresso machines at home and even dabble a little in home bean roasting. All job interviews start with coffee questions and you’ll even find references around our website and manuals. We often say all we do is turn coffee into code!

On a more serious note, our day normally starts with a dose of support. We have a policy where everyone starts out with some customer support (either technical support or sales support). Developers jump in for a hour or so at the start of the day. This approach ensures us developers have close contact with our users. Nothing helps turn ideas into applications more than being “in the trenches”.


Q: Tell me a little about what you do on Fridays?

A: Fridays are quite different to other days. We try to make Friday the “ideas day”. The company puts in Friday lunch for the team. We have a “food roster” and rotate around a selection of Pizza, Indian, Chinese, Lebanese and Japanese Sushi (to keep everyone happy!). Often the food is complimented with some homebrew beer. Tom, one of our core software developers, is also our resident (and award winning) beer brewer. Tom assists us in appreciating the finer points of beer. We then follow up lunch with a “tech talk”. This is where we share our knowledge on all manner of geeky topics. For example last Friday we did a session on keyboard shortcuts for the Eclipse IDE, and this week Hendrik will be taking everyone through Linux filesystem management with LVM. Topics are usually “Geek factor 10″, however after some of Tom’s beer (or good coffee) they always seem interesting for even the less geeky in the team. To mix things up a little, we’ve also started a Friday darts contest. Of course, this has gotten the geek treatment as well and rules like “ending on a prime number” often get thrown in to mix!

 

Q: How do you choose what to add in releases? How has that changed over time?

A: We have so many ideas. It’s hard to make a call on which feature to work on next. To make it easier we try to leave it to our users to make the decision. We ask customers to vote, and also bounce ideas off the sites we work closely with. Recently we’ve done lots of work under our Adopt A Feature program, as many of our large university customers have specific requirements, and need to “jump the queue”. Recently we’ve got the feeling that we’ve been doing too many of these so over the next few months we’re focusing back on core highly voted features!

 

Q: Tell me a little about your Developing World License? How was that brought about?

A: The developing world license was an initiative introduced by John about 7 years ago. We were detecting quite a high portion of piracy (unpaid copies of PaperCut) from developing countries. We obviously frown on that, but we can understand why it was occurring in poorer regions. John thought it would be good idea to offer subsidized or sponsored licenses for schools and colleges in these regions. The program has been a great success and we have small schools in Africa running PaperCut on networks powered by generators! It’s a great program as we hear some very interesting stories about how PaperCut is making a real difference. In many cases the developing world license takes the form of a Western school sponsoring a school in a developing region. Often this does not mean money, but rather some IT assistance via email to help them set up PaperCut. Many schools don’t have full time IT staff and it’s the teacher doubling as a system administrator. We’re proud that PaperCut is helping education sites like the animal ranger school in Tanzania or the Mercy Ships mission into Benin in Africa.

 

Q: Prospective or new customers may not be familiar with your release schedule, please enlighten us a bit about your timelines and why you choose to do it that way? 

A: We develop PaperCut under a “release often policy” and try to get a new version out every 6 to 8 weeks. This ensures we can get new features out as fast as possible. Having said that we don’t expect every site to upgrade PaperCut every time, however when you do upgrade, you’ll know that you’re getting the latest features fresh from our development team. Also on a pragmatic side the shorter release cycles take a little stress away from our development team. If a bug does slip through the testing net (which does happen from time to time!) we’re able to roll out a fix very quickly as we’re well rehearsed in quick turnarounds.

As a side-note, some think it seems strange that a software company would highlight that their software has bugs. This is also an important part of our development philosophy. We work hard on transparency. All bugs are disclosed in our release history, and urgent bugs are pushed out immediately via our knowledge base here.

 

Q: We know that the folks at PaperCut promote being green, how do you put that in practice?

A:  A lot of what PaperCut is about is saving paper and being green and you’ll find features such as your organization’s environmental impact is very visible in the application. We also have a new idea on how to present this information and encourage even more savings so stay tuned for future releases!

Of course we also try to be green in our office. When we need to send out paper invoices or print marketing brochures you’ll find that they’re on 100% recycled paper. Ann, our office manager is also our “paper overlord” and she takes care to ensure that paper used for print testing is used more than once!

We regularly find that one of the developers is testing PaperCut on the office printers, which often results in ransomed print jobs, along the lines of “It says here your print job costs $4.00. Pay up and I’ll release it for you!”.

Recently we’ve donated to a non-profit initiative called the Paper-Less Alliance and their focus is to save paper in many shapes and forms across industry – not just running PaperCut but doing other things like encourage electronic invoices and bank statements.

 

Q: How does one become a part of the PaperCut team?

A: We’re a tight knit team of “tech guys and girls” and are a growing company, so we’re always on the lookout for like-minded people. We look for people who share our passion for technology, transparency, and of course our love of coffee. If you ever end up in an interview, be ready for a grilling on the last point! Seriously though, if you think you would be a good fit, get in touch and tell us why the team needs you.

 

Q: Do you guys have a mascot? Where can we get PaperCut bumper stickers or other memorabilia?

A: Great question! Going back many years, Matt and I started PaperCut out of the back room at our house. In those days it was just the two of us spending many hours writing code. I decided it was a bit quiet in the office, and to ramp up the energy we adopted a puppy named “Macchiato” – named after coffee of course! Matt’s wife saw the puppy on its first day “of work” and sure enough the next week Matt had one two! The two puppies were very loyal and accompanied us through the long days and nights writing the first version of PaperCut NG. After a few chewed power cords and a move into commercial property saw the dogs go into comfortable retirement. They are both known to put in an appearance in the office from to time and have their photos on the wall!

 

Q: What has been your largest deployment? Can you explain some of the hardships you/your customer faced?

A: We’ve had some very large deployments of PaperCut. We assisted in a project in Scandinavia to deploy PaperCut across hundreds of schools via a centrally hosted datacenter. There is an install at a large Community College in Florida with over 350,000 users running on a smoking hot cluster setup. And more recently we assisted in a project to push PaperCut across a prestigious UK university which had so many rules and policies that their team spent weeks writing print scripts to accommodate the requirements. All of these projects have had their challenges. The technical hurdles were overcome with good teamwork – the DBA, the server admins, and our development team, all working together. The harder issues are always the political ones. What print quotas should students get? How do we keep the art department happy with their plotters? We’re yet to find a “geek solution” to inter-department politics

 

Q: Please feel free to provide any other facts/stories that would give a potential customer/green enthusiast/random IT guy some insight into PaperCut the company and your products.

A: My favorite story for tech guys is about “backups”! We received a call form one of our customers asking for assistance on restoring a database from a known backup. After a few minutes we had their system up and going and the chat turned to small talk… “So what happened?”. To cut a long story short, this system administrator managed the computers on a research station located on a small tropical island off the coast of Australia. University students would live on the island to conduct marine research. It turned out there was a fire. Unfortunately the fire was not confined to the lab, but spread and burnt down the whole island! In his words, “Tell all your customers to have a full backup plan… off-disk, off-site, and off-island!”.

…

- Tom2.0

You'll never break the build again!

At PaperCut we use continuous integration to monitor the quality of our codebase. It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally someone makes a mistake and the build gets broken. It’s important this is detected and rectified early so other members of the dev team are not inconvenienced.

Traditional Lava Lamps, and of course email, are the tools of choice to notify a team that the build is broken. However, lava lamps, just like pink curtains and shag pile, don’t really fit into the culture here at PaperCut. We thought we could do better, and so a new open source project called Retaliation was born!

Retaliation is a Jenkins CI build monitor that automatically coordinates a foam missile counter-attack against the developer who breaks the build. It does this by playing a pre-programmed control sequence to a USB Foam Missile Launcher to target the offending code monkey. Check out the video to see Tom take one in the back of the head all because of a missing semicolon!

At a deeper level Retaliation is more than just a “simple python script”. It’s a radical rethink into how to manage software development teams and the software development lifecycle. It works on a deep psychological level to offer vast productivity improvements. The primal threat of mutually assured destruction lurking in every coder’s psyche ensures that even your sloppiest developers will never forget to check in that missing file again!

Like all good apps Retaliation has testimonials that sing its praise…

It’s great to see that Chris’ skills in reverse engineering printer binary protocols has not gone to waste. He’s been able to apply this skill to a new field in reverse engineering Foam Missile Launcher system USB protocols! Coding print management software may not be the most glamorous job, however it just got that bit more sexy now that Retaliation is involved!

In the meantime, our new support system has now had some time to settle in. If you’ve contacted support lately you may have noticed some changes such as the new live chat interface and being able to log in to check the status of your ticket(s). For us, the system provides better visibility of open tickets and makes it easier for your question to go straight to the person with the right knowledge to help.

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…

Our Analysis
Our first wish list item was a centralized system with both Live-Chat and email ticketing. Too often we had customers jump on our easily accessible (and therefor timely!) Live Chat system and say “About that ticket I wrote in last week. I have an update.” This meant we had to jump into another system, search around for their email address, checking various queues. What if it went to sales instead of technical support, thats another system again!

Other objective we had was to “learn from others”. Given that the wheel has been made, remade and improved on, why not ask around and find out what’s in use. We have a large user base, many with their own help desks (e.g. Universities) and also many resellers who have support systems in place. We started asking around!

We soon came away with a fairly large list of candidates ranging from Bugzilla through to OTRS, my old favourite RT and some of the new comers such as ZenDesk and Kayako. From this list we had to whittle down the candidates to the point where would sign up for trials and spend the time to test them out. We dropped those systems that were bug trackers, CRMs, Project Management tools and we certainly dropped those that haven’t been updated since 2007! A live web chat feature was also important so this again this allowed us to rule out a few.

We were left with the following candidates, ZenDesk, Zoho Support, Smarter Tracker, Kayako and Cerb5. In no particular order:

And the winner is…
After more testing we found ourselves coming back to Kayako more and more. In the end, the Live Chat and OnSite combination was excellent. Customization of the installation via the templates was equally good. Quite possibly what sold us was the Live Chat -> Offline Message -> Ticket Process where if we’re busy on the phones, a customer can leave a message that we can get back to with quickly.

So with all that said, we’ve implemented the new system. As with all IT projects there are bound to be some hidden issues but we’ll work hard to ensure PaperCut’s print management software support moves along as usually – just with a bit more polish on the inside!

Image “Old Ericsson Phone” by Alexandre Dulaunoy / CC BY-SA

This task, being a relatively straightforward one, was given to me (Puneet), the summer intern. I started my internship here at PaperCut Software in January 2011. It has been a pleasure working here with friendly, hardworking and enthusiastic coffee-loving developers (they weren’t able to make me start drinking coffee though!).

Over my very exciting and fulfilling two months here, I did a great amount of software testing, helped out with User Web Tool Customisation, restructured the Knowledge Base, added the header and footer to the online manual, and now, revamped the free Print Logger.

In this version…

• Most of my work went into stripping down and re-decorating the Print Logger with the New look and feel based on PaperCut 11’s new design.
• We added the News Gadget which allows you to keep up to date with the developments at PaperCut.
• The New About tab lets us share some information about PaperCut and lets you follow us close.

Print Logger is aimed at small businesses and home users. Don’t hesitate, download the new version today!

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.

Spaghetti Cables

That’s what my desktop is like here at PaperCut, and it’s a real pain in the donkey. One day after enough plugging and unplugging to wear out the connections I decided it was time to look for a better way…

Ye Olde Printer Share - the LPT switch!

What I did find was plenty of audio/video switches for RCA plugs – the kind you would use under an old TV to switch between TV, VCR and DVD. This formed the basis of a crazy plan: could I use an AV switch for desktop audio? RCA has three plugs – two for audio, one for video. Surely I could just use the video plug for the microphone and I’d be set?!

I went to work finding all the parts. These arrived in bits and pieces over the next few weeks, at prices I don’t attempt to comprehend (one connector was shipped from Hong Kong in an envelope with a hand-written address, and the total price was less than a dollar!). All going to plan, this setup would allow me to:

• Listen to music/audio from my cell phone, and answer calls.
• Listen to music/audio from my computer, and answer calls (on VoIP / Skype).
• Answer calls from my desktop phone.

And if I wanted any of that on my desktop speakers, I’d just need to turn them on.

Here’s how it fit together:

I have no idea what some of these connectors are really used for

And… it worked! Kind of.

When switched to the desktop phone there was a loud static hissing. When switched to the computer, Skype wouldn’t recognize the microphone (although other applications worked fine). Perhaps both of these were due to the poor quality switch? In any case, the setup didn’t cut it.

What’s the next step? These days many modern headsets plug into computers via USB. This means they don’t use the computer’s sound card, but rather emulate their own. This allows the headset to produce/emulate surround sound, have a microphone, add mute buttons and other buttons all sharing the one USB plug. Obviously the audio switch setup above can’t be used with a USB plug, but if everything was in the computer and managed by software then the problem goes away – you could just switch between inputs and outputs in your OS’s sound properties.

This shift from hardware to software is the inevitable evolution of many technologies. This includes printing, as Peter pointed out in his post on the history of digital printing and of course demonstrated clearly by the fact that we don’t use hardware printer switches today! Putting these functions in software allows for ultimate flexibility in switching, control and automation. When someone is calling, the audio can die down and pause, and afterwards the audio resumes, just like happens on cell phones today.

All of this seems like it should be technically possible, but the devil is in the details. Does anyone have a desktop audio success story to share? How do you manage your audio devices in the office or at home?

Image “Project 365 #318: 141109 Spaghetti Junction!” by comedy_nose / CC BY