PaperCut Blog / News

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.

For the past month Tom and I have been quietly working away on our new website. It was satisfying to push it live today (Sunday night US time). The new site is quite a change for us. It’s the first time we’ve used an external designer. Here are a few screen-shots showing how our site has evolved over the last ten years:

PaperCut Circa 2000

PaperCut Circa 2004

PaperCut Circa 2009

PaperCut Circa 2010 (Today)

Historically all our web design has been done in-house. As a bunch of computer programmers we are very proficient in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, however when it comes to artistic flair we finally conceded that we were hitting our limits. It was time for some outside help! After some searching we found a web designer (Pollenizer) we felt was able extend our own culture and style rather than impose their own.

I see that the Internet has two quite different styles:

1. The “Corporate Look” – conservative sites painted with fancy stock images (often from istockphoto.com). If we were to adopt this style I suppose we’d have some attractively dressed person standing smiling next to a printer )

2. The “Web 2.0 Look” - punchy colors, wide open spaces, and a focus on content / message rather than visual gloss – like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.

As PaperCut has grown over the years, we’ve expanded from being a solution exclusively for education to one focused on all areas from schools, to SME, to large business. Increasingly PaperCut is presented at management-level in corporate organizations. Despite this “enterprise shift”, we still felt that the Web 2.0 look better fitted with our technical-focused culture. We felt it was important to have a website that reflects who we are and the way we work. We’re quite proud that we’re an engineering driven organization run by young developers and want to make this clear through our website.

The visual design of the new website was done by one of the lead web designers behind Kazaa – in its day one of the Internet’s most popular sites (and one that will undoubtedly also go down in history for notorious reasons!). He’s done lots of work with leading Web 2.0 companies and I think has done a great job for us. We hope you like the new design. We’ve kept with our green theme (in both color and environmental impact aspect), and also put more focus on our name rather than our starting-to-look-dated XP style icon.

At a technical level the site is also a departure from the norm. We’ve decided to cast away the shackles of IE6 (darn Microsoft!) and now target the last web technologies (It still “works” in IE6 but is not visually ideal). We’ve also making extensive use of CSS and JQuery. One of the design goals was to have the home page load as fast as our older site. We’ve come close to this with the help of a few tricks. For example you’ll notice the progressive image loading on the home page – the content renders really quickly, while the glowing tree loads in later in the background (this tree constitutes about half of the page download and is done last and faded in with a JQuery effect). Some other technical highlights include:

• Designed for larger screens (not many system administrators are running 1024 monitors on their desktop these days!)
• Leverages CSS font kerning and shadow
• Enabled GZip server-side compression on selected resources. e.g. compress our CSS and Javascript files. (If this works well we’ll consider enabling on other resource types.)
• We’ve used cutting-edge CSS styling attributes available in Firefox and Webkit based browsers such as rounded corners on DIV elements (emulated in IE using curvycorners.js)
• JQuery is downloaded off GoogleAPI’s CDN. Many sites are now using this so these resources are already in people’s local cache.
• Some Apache .htaccess tweaks to more effectively leverage local browser caching.
• Renders on the iPad and iPhone!

Hope you all enjoy the behind the scenes story and welcome the new look! I should also mention that the blog/news section which you are reading now is not yet skinned in the new style!

We’re working on a new website design and the moment and I’ve been crafting some new content for the home page. We’ve always proclaimed that PaperCut is in use in over 60 countries, but this was based on figures back in 2006. I was wondering if we’d add any more to the list over the years. So during a cup of coffee today I jumped into the license system and with a bit of UNIX command-line magic and came up with the new list. We’ve now cracked 100! As a computer programmer, it’s great to know that your software is helping save paper in so many countries.

I was pretty good at Geography in high school but one name on the list stumped me. Where is Benin? Well, now I know! Thanks to Africa Rice in Benin for helping us add one more to the list.

Many of these countries are supported under our Developing World program. If you’re an education organization in the developing world, please contact us to discuss options.

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.

As you all can tell from reading our blog, PaperCut is very much an engineering driven organization. What does this mean? Well, in short, our company is stacked full of engineers and computer geeks! We love computers, love programming, and love working with smart customers. Our engineering team (as opposed to a marketing team) controls our company direction and priorities.

Marketing, although still important, does take a back seat here at PaperCut. We don’t have any marketing staff at all! Over the years we’ve found that nothing has helped sell PaperCut more than simply “making it better”! Instead of spending money on glossy magazine ads, we re-invest into a better PaperCut. Having the best technology and relying on word-of-mouth is our model. Our advertising is you.

Most of the word-of-mouth support is just that – you talking to fellow IT system administrators. Occasionally however it takes a different form such as this this great article on Tech Republic, or this blog post by Ken over at ChangeForge. We also can’t forget the EduGeek tribe.

We also love reading about how our handywork is used. It might be:

• talk about the environment
• going green and being responsible
• feedback on how students respond to PaperCut
• a frank college magazine editorial
• pictures of our software on copiers
• proof that PaperCut makes a difference
• or attempting to read about PaperCut in languages I don’t understand!

And as an engineer there is also nothing more rewarding than seeing your latest work being appreciated. In 2009 we began a formal voting process to prioritize our development. Thousands of our users voted and Web Print quickly hit the number one spot. We pushed it up the priority list and got it does as quickly as we could. It’s great to see  so  many  people  now benefiting from this work! (Print scripting is our latest feature, so if you have any good ideas or feedback here, please share)

From all the engineers here at PaperCut, a big thanks to our marketing team – YOU!

“A mathematician”, according to the late Hungarian mathematician Alfred Renyi, “is a device for turning coffee into theorems”. Seems like good old Alfred knew a thing or two about intellectual work, he and colleague Paul Erdos of Erdos number fame were known to consume copious amounts of the stuff. With work at PaperCut occasionally requiring a brain cell or two, it is no coincidence that the location for PaperCut’s R&D facilities was chosen to be in close proximity to a strategic source of this magic potion that fuels all activity in making, supporting and maintaining Print Control Software: Cafe Vermeer.

Not officially on PaperCut’s payroll due to the secretive, high priority nature of their mission, Cafe Vermeer’s Rosalina and Eric are on stand-by 8 hours a day wielding advanced machinery to whip coffee beans into a state consumable by PaperCut’s demanding and discerning coders should their BCC* drop below minimum comfort levels. Caffeine demands tend to culminate in twice-daily coffee pilgrimages, mid-morning and mid-afternoon, although a debate on whether coffee should be consumed French-style right after lunch or English-tea-style later in the afternoon has been causing a division in the office population along lines of provenance (Being of German origin, I subscribe to the former).

Haunting memories linger at PaperCut from when Vermeer was closed for a day forcing the indignity of sourcing second-tier material from so-called ‘other cafes’ in the area. This shows that the consistent quality of the caffeinated and the occasional cocoa-flavored beverages fabricated in Cafe Vermeer is a secret ingredient in the consistent quality of PaperCut’s software and support. So is their effort of maintaining the coffee preference chart mapping our developer’s names to their default coffee order so one can stay focused on semantics of the ‘volatile’ keyword in Java version 1.3 which …. ah but this story will be told another time.

So what about the 21st century corollary to the mathematician coffee thesis: “a software developer is a device for turning coffee into code”? Were our Hungarian mathematicians alive today, they would surely agree.

*blood caffeine concentration

I’ve just arrived back from the USA where I spent a week at the Novell Brainshare conference – Novell being the newest platform PaperCut supports. As the main Linux & Novell developer I had the task of tripping over to Salt Lake City in the USA and manning the PaperCut stand. Rick also joined me from PaperCut’s US office. Novell, both the the company and the user community, is an interesting environment. Many people think of Novell as an “aging platform”, however it’s very different today. Novell today is more focused on services sitting on top of the OS. The base OS is now Linux and the focus on open source has really changed the environment. The community today very much has a “Linux feel” – full of lots of smart forward looking administrators and managers.

As a developer I loved this conference. Because the crowd was so technical all discussions were very interesting. Less time talking about how glossy the brochure is, and more time talking about “tech stuff” like, clustering, the process-level isolation design used in PaperCut’s OES Linux version, and how cool PaperCut’s new advanced scripting feature is! There were lots of organizations on legacy Netware and PCounter installs looking for more modern alternatives. I think we impressed lots of people here. I regularly heard comments like, “PaperCut is the best 3rd party application to come the Novell platform in years”, both from existing and potential new users.

I also got the opportunity to catch up with many of our Novell users from around the world. It was great to put some faces to some names and speak to people using our German, Korean and Portuguese versions. Fortunately everyone spoke English! Many also came with lists of ideas for future releases, some of which we’ve already started work on.

One story that I think summed up the conference occurred on the third day. I’d been flat out on the stand talking to people all morning. Finally there was a lull so we took the opportunity to pop out and grab a quick coffee, only to return to the pavilion to see a group gathering around the stand. I thought, “Typical. Everyone decided to arrive at the exact 10 minutes we’re not there.” As I got closer I noticed they were all looking at the computer and playing with the software. It turned out that one in the group was already a PaperCut user, loved the software and wanted to show a few others he’d met. No one was on the stand so he decided to give his own demo. Wow! If I had of known it was that easy I would have just set up the stand and went skiing for a few days instead

And yes. It briefly snowed while I was in Salt Lake City. A interesting experience as an Aussie coming from a long hot summer!

“Mr iPrint” and Chris
Ted (Novell’s main iPrint developer from Provo) and Chris at the PaperCut stand.

PaperCut on Novell users from the UK
Me with Simon from Cambridge University and Richard from Brighton & Hove College.

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.

When I first started as an intern at PaperCut in late November I didn’t now what to expect. As I first entered head office in Melbourne, I mentally prepared myself for all the usual mundane tasks that interns are inevitably assigned to (fetching coffee being at the top of the list). Now, being almost three months down the track, I can confidently say that my experience here at PaperCut couldn’t be any more personally and professionally fulfilling.

During my first two weeks at PaperCut I quickly realised that quality assurance was a BIG thing. Any new release candidate for PaperCut goes through a stringent testing process. For a period of time all development stops, and the whole team gets their hands on the newest version. We then go through a check-list of features to test, all of which must be tested on each supported operating system (Windows, Mac, Linux). Testing is no small thing here at PaperCut, it’s an intense process designed to catch as many bugs as possible in our print management software.

So, after I had settled in at PaperCut, Chris asked me to look into how we could increase the effectiveness and efficiency of our testing process. PaperCut has been using automated unit testing (testing of individual software modules) for a while, but Chris pointed me in the direction of automated functional testing. In affect, automating the manual testing described above.

Functional testing is the testing of the software as a whole. This form of testing provides benefits that are unachievable using unit testing. While unit testing is still useful for ensuring we don’t make any silly mistakes in small parts of of the product, functional testing is essentially simulating a user interacting with our software.

How is this all done? Over the past two months I’ve designed and written a framework that uses existing, mature software (including Selenium). I then used this functional testing framework to create scripts that simulate tasks that most users would do every day, syncing groups/users, editing printer properties, generating reports, performing printing.

It does this all by opening up a web browser and interacting with the user interface of PaperCut. It’s is completely automated, robust, and many times faster than any human. Below you can see a little demonstration of the testing at work, this test, which is one of dozens, is designed to generate every report and ensure that they successfully completed.  This process was previously done “by hand” and took 30 minutes or more:

The automated testing framework is designed to help us accomplish two things; firstly, we don’t want to catch ‘most’ bugs, we want to catch all bugs. By reducing the potential for human error involved in our test processes, we increase the quality of testing. Secondly the speed at which these tests can be completed not only increases the amount of the application that we can test, but it means that the development team has more time to continue improving PaperCut.

This automated testing was used side-by-side with regular user testing, and unit testing, in the latest version 10 release, and will continue to be integrated into our standard testing procedures in the future. Automated testing was never intended to replace good old-fashioned manual testing, but it is my hope that it will allow us to provide an ever-increasing quality of service.

Last week we released PaperCut 10.0 with the much requested “Printer Groups” feature. But we’re not standing still. All our developers are working hard to implement the new ideas that you’ve been asking for. As you can see from our release history the product continues to improve with each release. But we want to do more … much more … and faster!

And to do that we need another fantastic developer to join the PaperCut team at our head office in Melbourne. If you’re interested, or know any friends who might be … please read on and apply.

The full position description is included below. If you’re applying mention that you read our blog for bonus points!

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