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.

(This is an older news post that has been migrated into the blog)

PaperCut version 10.3 is out the door. How did you find out about it?

There are many ways to keep informed about new PaperCut released. Aside from checking papercut.com, checking the download page and checking the About tab in PaperCut, you can also subscribe to the release feeds. These feeds are updated whenever we release a new version of PaperCut. You can find them on the download pages for PaperCut NG and PaperCut ChargeBack.

If you’re wondering what a feed is or how to use one, try:

• Google Reader, the online feed reader for anyone with a Google
  account (and other online feed readers like Bloglines).
• The “live bookmarks” feature in
  Mozilla Firefox (and similar features in
  other browsers), which will display the feed updates alongside your bookmarks.
• The feed readers built into most modern email clients.
• Feed-to-email services, which will convert feed updates into emails (if you don’t want to use a feed reader).

Nearly everyone here at PaperCut makes use of Google Reader to keep up to date with everything from news to blogs to social network updates… and our own releases, in case we forgot

While we’re on the topic of communication, we’ve also just added a new mailing list for announcements. This is a read-only list (so you only get emails from us here at PaperCut) for information concerning PaperCut administrators. If you added your email to the technical contact field when ordering PaperCut then you’re already subscribed. A discussion mailing list is on the way.

(This is an older news post that has been migrated into the blog)

Today we’ve released PaperCut version 10.2, and with it a frequently requested feature: page-level color detection for PCL6 drivers. PaperCut’s page-level color detection performs a detailed analysis of print jobs to determine the usage of color on a per-page basis. E.g. when a student prints a 20 page assignment with color on just the front page they will still get the grayscale discount on the other 19 pages. Previously page-level color detection was available on PostScript, PCL5 and HPGL drivers. Now we have added PCL6 / PCLXL to that list. Together this adds up to page-level color detection support for the vast majority of printers in use today.

Another notable feature in this release is quotas for shared accounts. This is a useful feature for those wanting to set up department budgets or cost goals. E.g. A regular payment of $500 per month can be made to the English department account. When the balance dips below $0 the department is over their budget/cost goal, and the reports will make that stick out like a sore thumb!

We’ve also been getting a lot of positive feedback about the advanced scripting feature introduced in version 10.1. It’s well worth a look if you hadn’t had the chance to try it out yet. Let us know what you think.

The full list of changes can be found in the release histories for PaperCut NG and PaperCut ChargeBack.

(This is an older news post that has been migrated into the blog)

If you are a geek, you’ll find that our new 10.1 release contains what is probably the most exciting and highly anticipated feature to date: Advanced Scripting. This feature is targeted squarely at our core audience of system administrators, and is the start of a whole new level of flexibility and functionality.

What have we done? First, we added a script editor to the admin interface:

All scripts are written in JavaScript, the most common and well known scripting language. Don’t be fooled however, this kind of scripting has nothing to do with web pages.

The first use of the new advanced scripting feature is to write print scripts – scripts that run when a new print job arrives. Your script can do a whole host of things including checking details of the job and influencing what happens to it. Some examples:

• Displaying a pop-up message if a user forgets to select duplex on large jobs.
• Showing statistics on the environmental impact on large jobs via a fancy popup dialog.
• Prompting the user to confirm large jobs before printing.
• Automatically routing large jobs to more efficient high volume printers.
• … and much much more!

So what does an actual script look like? Something like this:

The user manual contains a new Advanced Scripting chapter that will help to get you started. Happy scripting!

As usual the full list of changes can be found in the release histories for PaperCut NG and PaperCut ChargeBack.

P.S. If you have a novel script idea or just a comment or suggestion about the new feature please let us know!

Version 10.0 of PaperCut is now available, just fitting into our target December-January period for new major versions. This release brings several new features including printer groups and some visual updates to the client tool. The printer groups feature allows printers to be tagged or grouped together for management or reporting purposes. The client tool has had a graphic and GUI effects makeover and now sits nicely with the “glassy” look found in modern operating systems.

The full list of changes can be found in the release histories for PaperCut NG and PaperCut ChargeBack.

This release is the start of many new features, major and minor, that will become a part of version 10 in the coming months and throughout the year. Upgrading to version 10 now will entitle you to all current and upcoming features in the 10.x series.

A feature that is scheduled in the next few weeks but fell short of 10.0 is the new advanced scripting interface for print job routing, redirection and conditional client interaction. This feature is undergoing some final polish and testing, and once available will open the door to a wide range of possibilities.

Customers with upgrade assurance may upgrade to version 10.x at any time. 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.

The year is at an end, and we have one final release for those wanting to upgrade over the break.

Along with some all-round improvements this release updates PaperCut for better compatibility with the recently released CUPS version 1.4, the print system in Mac OS 10.6 and recent Linux distributions. Although the purpose of the changes in CUPS 1.4 was to improve printing performance they required us to make significant changes in the way we track and control print jobs on the platform. On the surface there are no noticeable differences in the way PaperCut is configured or runs, which is the way we like it. Organizations using CUPS 1.4 should upgrade to version 9.8 of PaperCut for the best compatibility.

The full list of changes can be found in the release histories for PaperCut NG and PaperCut ChargeBack.

Happy holidays and new year.

After recently adding some major features to PaperCut, such as Web Print and the manager mode pop-up, we’ve been back to basics, polishing our existing features and improving on the core functionality of PaperCut.

Amongst other features, this release contains support for XPS documents with Web Print, along with many new reports and report filters. Extending on the previous release’s User configuration report focusing on configuration of user accounts, this release contains similar configuration reports for groups, printers and shared accounts.

The full list of changes can be found in the release histories for PaperCut NG and PaperCut ChargeBack.

In the latest round of our Vote for a Feature survey we’ve received thousands of votes. Thanks to all those who have contributed. We’ve listened to your feedback and polished off the top two most requested features:

1. Driver-less printing for wireless clients

   Version 9.6 introduces a new solution to help manage wireless and laptop printing:
   Web Print. Web Print allows users to print by
   simply uploading documents using a standard web browser. No client software or driver installation is required.
   Web Print provides a simple way to enable printing for laptop, wireless and anonymous users without the
   overhead of installing printer drivers and managing server authentication.

2. Renaming printers

   Printers can now be renamed via the admin interface. This can be useful after renaming a print queue in the OS
   or after migrating a print queue to a new system.

Another highly requested feature added in this release is print job refund management. If a user finds that some or all of their job wasn’t printed, e.g. due to a paper jam or toner problem, they can now easily request a refund via the user web interface. Administrators can be notified of pending refund requests via email and attend to them via the admin interface.

Remember your votes count so keep the feedback coming! As always the full list of changes can be found in the release history for PaperCut NG and PaperCut ChargeBack.