PaperCut Blog / News

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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As time goes on we increase both the number of features in our software and the number of customers using it. Because the developers of PaperCut also provide customer support, there is a balance between the two that continues to tip towards support as the number of customers increases. When the team starts to feel like our rate of development is slowing it’s time to increase the size of the team (someone suggested reducing the size of our customer base but were promptly shut down).

Traditionally we’ve hired only software developers. This is good for keeping up development pace, and our customers are happy to speak directly with the developers for support. There is a gap, however: when developing PaperCut we work with programming languages, web technologies and APIs. When supporting PaperCut we deal with print queues, user directories and databases. While we know a lot about the technologies our customers use, our expertise is in developing software for our customers. It became clear that we want someone who knows all about the technologies our customers use to help our customers use our software with those technologies. It became clear that we want… one of our customers.

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

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Well done to Dennis and his team from Latvia. PaperCut is now available in the Russian language. This brings PaperCut now to 20 languages with a few more on the way. This was our first language using the Cyrillic alphabet. We had to overcome a few issues with the PDF reports, however the process generally went very smoothly. Most of the bugs with dealing with non-latin character sets came out when we did the Chinese translations a few years back.

Welcome to all the new users in Russia, CIS & Baltic States.

Click for larger view

Back in 2001 we received an order from Mercy Ships. After an online search into “Mercy Ships” it was decided it would be a nice gesture to give them PaperCut as a donation.

How thrilled we were at PaperCut to receive a letter this week by regular post.

The letter, from Mercy Ships, was a thank you for our continuing support, providing them with PaperCut and free upgrades and support over the years.

There was an outline of the work that Mercy Ships program.

Mercy Ships have a mission to the world’s impoverished people.

Several Mercy Ships programs address the various needs in many surgical areas, community development and also in the training of nationals. One area that has been especially helpful is the Hospitality Centre Eye Clinic in Benin, Africa.

One month after having cataracts removed, eye patients return to the Hospitality Centre Eye Clinic for additional procedure to prevent a film-like layer developing over the lens and impeding vision ……. many patients who have been blind for years by cataracts can now see.

This news, shared with all our staff, gave us all a great feeling and we are happy to be a part of helping Mercy Ships with their work.  Check out the video here to find out more about what Mercy Ships do.

All the best Mercy Ships, PaperCut is glad to be a small part of your journey.

We were amazed a few weeks ago when a customer from Germany emailed to inquire about an upgrade from version 1.0. Wow! We emailed back asking them to confirm. “Are you sure you’re running version 1? That’s almost 10 years old!” Sure enough the customer was correct. They were customer number 47 and purchased and installed PaperCut almost 10 years ago. It’s been running perfect ever since but they needed to re-install and had lost the key. I thought some of our other users may be interested to know more about this story so I emailed Marco and asked him if he’d answer a few questions for our blog. Not only did he oblige, but the team at Landkreis Calw have written us a poem!

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.