PaperCut Blog / News

We’ve recently had a few people contact us via Twitter and email asking about the 10.5 release. We’re running a little late behind schedule, however this is for good reason. This is likely to be our largest release in terms of features yet. Hence testing and feature finalization is taking a little longer than expected. Some of the highlights in the release include:

Watermarking:
The ability to add some text to the bottom of every page printed. This text is configurable in terms of content, font-size and color. Typical uses include:

• adding student names or student numbers to the bottom of their print jobs
• writing job metadata in the footer such as print time, printer, document name, etc.
• add a digital signature (SHA1 or MD5 HMAC) to all pages allowing you to track documents and verify authenticity/originality/source.

Multiple Personal Accounts:
It will now be possible for users to have more than one personal accounts. This feature has been developed in conjunction with Cambridge University in the UK. A typical use would be splitting student cash payments and free print quotas into separate buckets to make refund management easier. However in large organizations such as Cambridge it can be used, in conjunction with print scripting, to allow different departments/groups/colleges to manage their own print credits on their own printers.

Re-sending data after connection failure:
We’ve added new code to handle exceptional cases such as network connections failing between servers. For example say you have PaperCut installed on a business WAN with print servers spread across geographic regions. If the connection temporarily fails between offices, PaperCut can now be configured to locally record transactions and re-send them across when the connection comes back up.

All the three features listed above have been on the top of the vote list for many months. It will be great to have them released. And don’t forget that we’ll always include in many, many minor improvements and bug fixes.

We’re working hard to get the release out next week and will keep you posted on progress via our twitter feed.

I am one of the female developers here at PaperCut… well at the current time the only female developer! For the past few months most of my development has been driven by your votes in the feature survey. We are constantly analyzing the votes and using it to prioritize our development. I have already implemented various highly voted features such as:

• the ability to edit scheduled reports.
• the ability save scheduled reports to disk.
• the option to create and manage printer groups (using a tagging paradigm).

The next feature I have my sights on will be “Adhoc bulk user updates” which is one of the highly requested feature at the time of writing. An MSI packaged client (and secondary/local print server installer) is another one on the horizon, but I suspect one of the “boys” might beat me to that one…

I will post updates on my progress as I move along. Voting will re-open soon. In the meantime here’s how voting stands for some of the top requests:

CC image courtesy of osde8info on flickr

We’re happy to announce version 9.0 of PaperCut, a milestone and our 10th year anniversary release. As most would know, we have a release often policy and add many new features in minor point releases, although we do like to throw in at least one exciting new feature in a major release. Version 9.0 is no exception and includes plenty of new festive season goodies including find me printing, load balancing, and toner level detection and alerts.

Many of these features will benefit sites with large printer fleets. The toner level detection and alert feature will help schedule printer supplies purchasing and avoid getting caught off guard with no toner left in the printer. Nothing makes life easier than a friendly reminder email in your inbox!

Load balancing can be used to distribute the workload amongst a set of identical printers located in the same room, helping reduce turnaround time and distributing wear and tear among the print fleet.

The new find me printing feature is ideal for organizations currently utilizing print release stations. It solves many of the problems of printer selection. Instead of the user having to select the printer at the time of print, they can print to a single general global queue instead. When the job is released at the release station the system will automatically select the closest most appropriate printer. No more need to understand cryptic printer naming conventions, just find the closest printer and your job will find you!

These major features are also complemented with our usual smaller but no less important additions including support for new printer models and printing languages, new reports and report settings. Version 9.0 also lives up to our commitment of cross platform support. With Novell recently joining the ranks of officially supported platforms, PaperCut now works equally well on all four major server operating environments.

Version 9.0 is currently in release candidate mode, meaning customers are invited to download and evaluate the application in their environment and run testing scenarios according to their needs. The official release is scheduled for the week starting January 5th. System administrators looking to take advantage of some of the new features are advised to set aside some time for this upgrade.

(release candidate download links removed as the final release is now available)

In the meantime we’ll be working on 9.1 for which a number of features have been planned already. Stay tuned to this channel!

You all have probably noticed the PaperCut NG 7.2 and PaperCut ChargeBack 7.1 releases by now. We’ve had lots of good feedback about the new scheduled/emailed reports feature. This was Tom’s project so he deserves all the credit. We’re planning another update in the next two weeks with some more new features including an easier method to schedule quota allocations on ad-hoc dates (e.g. start of semester).

Today we also released PaperCut Print Logger 1.1. This is a minor update to Print Logger including support for new printer hardware and translations in German and French.

I’ve just uploaded another build with a few small fixes and changes, including:

• Allow the internal admin password to be changed from within the user interface (on the Options->Advanced) tab.
• In the Internet Usage logs screens, allow the results to be sorted by the “MB received (ex cached)” column.
• Fix error that can occur when saving groups if only the Internet Control module is enabled.
• Other small fixes.

You can download the latest release (Build 3858) from the Net Control module testing page.

Just touching base to let you know that we’ve released a new build that includes a number of changes (a number as a result of feedback from our testers). The testing has been going well. We’ve had no reports of any major problems. Most of the comments have been about feature suggestions or usability suggestions.

You can download the latest release (Build 3853) from the Net Control module testing page.
The latest build include the following changes:

• Allow the Internet usage for a single user to be disabled for a specific amount of time or indefinitely (time latches). This can be useful to discipline students who have abused Internet privileges, but you still want them to be able to print.
• Allow data costs to be defined “per gigabyte” in addition to “per megabyte”
• Allow the user client window position to be changed. This allows multiple user clients to be run when different PaperCut instances host Net and Print control.
• Clarify some of the terminology to make it easier to understand whether data includes cached data or not.
• Ignore machine accounts (e.g. username$) in proxy logs. These entries are recorded when a Windows machine downloads Windows updates.
• Improved LDAP support for large sites.
• Licensing changes to allow users who are registered for Print Control to be able to trial the Net Module for 40 days.
• Bumped the version number to 7.0.
• All the updates included in the latest 6.2 release (see here for full details).