Restricting Printing By Group with Exceptions

It is common for organizations to want to limit printing or color printing by Active Directory group. In many of these cases they also want to make exceptions.

There are several ways of doing this in PaperCut that differ in the level of complexity.

No Exceptions

Applying user filters based on group membership and Filters & Restrictions explain how to do this. This is the simplest method and will work if no exceptions are needed.

e.g. Give members of group Teachers and no other users color access.

This can be done in the PaperCut web admin interface by

• navigating to Printers → Printer List → <Your printer> → Printer Details → Filters & Restrictions,
• enabling Only allow the following groups to print in color: and
• selecting the Teachers group.

Using an Active Directory Group for Exceptions

Sometimes users outside a single main group will need to be given printing or color printing rights from time to time.

e.g. Nominated students will be given color printing rights for end-of-term assignments.

This can be done by

• creating an extra Active Directory group. e.g. ExtraColor and
• giving that group color printing access in PaperCut as described above.

Then students can moved in and out of the ExtraColor AD group as needed.

Exceptions Without Changing Active Directory

Sometimes there will be security or administrative requirements that prevent Active Directory groups being created for managing printing.

In this case the simplest way to allow exceptions is to make users unrestricted and checking the Only apply filters to restricted users box in the Filters & Restrictions tab described above

This scenario is described in Applying user filters based on group membership.