Print Archiving (viewing and content capture)

Print data is typically short-lived, the user prints the job and then the print job content is lost. PaperCut NG/MF’s Print Archiving feature changes that. With Print Archiving, in addition to PaperCut’s standard print job information logging, it is now possible to:

Save and archive print jobs for a defined period of time
Interactively view what has been printed

Print Archiving is a very visual feature and is best explained with a few screen shots.

Print Archiving, including the ability to view previous print jobs, gives administrators a new set of tools to improve print management. Common uses include:

Information Security compliance, data retention, audit policies and governance

Many corporations now have defined data management objectives and specific policies around the tracking of data in emails, using thumb drives, cloud storage services, etc. This allows organizations to:
- Comply with externally mandated and legal requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley and best practice audit procedures.
- Support an organization’s needs to protect its customers’ and own intellectual property.
- Monitor inappropriate material and potential illegal activity.
- Ensure business resources are being used appropriately and not being wasted.
Print Archiving now allows organizations to extend these security policies to the printer fleet and closes a potentially big loophole in governance processes.
Fleet Optimization

Inspecting a sample of print jobs held by Print Archiving can help with key resource decision making questions. Is the inkjet photo printer being used for photos? Or should it be replaced with a more appropriate device for color text document output, such as a laser printer?
Identify Misuse and abuse of printing policies

Print Archiving allows a system administrator to remotely monitor not only the volume of printed pages, but also the content. Isolated and unsupervised printers are no longer open to rampant abuse, as administrators can now review printed documents on demand.
Validating user refund requests

In education environments, it is common for refund requests to be submitted via PaperCut NG/MF. The ability for administration staff to review the job via Print Archiving can greatly assist in this scenario. See Managing Refunds for more on this feature.

Caution

In the same way that email and server administrators have privileged access to a user’s email and documents, a PaperCut NG/MF administrator can access the user’s print job content. Treat a SysAdmin’s privilege to view archived print jobs with the same professional caution as similar access privileges to a user’s private data. PaperCut NG/MF has granular control on administrative rights so this can be managed. For more information, see Assigning Administrator Access to a User .

Feature Highlights

Store an historic record of all printed content, limited only by available storage space.
View past print jobs interactively in the browser.
Control which administrators have access to view or remove archived content.
Download the original spool file for 100% fidelity when reprinting.
Remove archived data from the system and disk.
Move older archives to external storage, such as offline backup or offsite cloud repository, for long term data retention.
Enable or disable archiving on selected printers and users.

Common Objections

Permissions

When developing Print Archiving, we made sure that we allowed the use of fine-grained access control. Security has always been an important part of PaperCut and we made sure that this was taken into account with Print Archiving in two ways:

Print Archiving is turned off by default
When enabled, only the top-level “Admin” account has access to to view printed documents. Additional users must be added in manually.

All my print jobs are now being saved!

At first glance, this can be a scary thought. The truth is that PaperCut is simply added more accessibility around a feature that was already in Windows. Keep printed documents is a Windows feature that makes the Windows’ print queue keep spool files instead of deleting them after the document has been printed. This allows users or administrators to later reprint or view the spool file.

PaperCut adds security and auditing around a process that is already part of modern Windows networks.

Viewing print logs

When Print Archiving is enabled, new options are available for viewing print logs (for example, the global job log at Logs > Job Log, or the per-printer or per-user job logs).

Details view:

This is the traditional text-only job log view and is best for finding and browsing by non-visual job log information.
Hybrid view (thumbnails + details):

The hybrid view is the most flexible view option. It adds a thumbnail column to the details view. This allows for easy filtering and sorting of the print logs table while also being able to view print logs visually.
Thumbnails/grid view:

This view favors images over text and is the best view for visually scanning to identify documents of interest.