We don’t often post about new builds but the numbers 14716 have made everyone here at selectec HQ ecstatic.

We like to pester the developers with our demands and wishes for PaperCut and one of the little tweaks we have wanted for a while now finally crept out into a public build last night! Oh yes they have increased the default timeout of jobs in hold/release queues!
This could always be manually changed but the amount of emails we get from people wondering where their print jobs had gone was getting silly Also of interest in this build is support for a load of new Lexmark and Kyocera Mita machines.

Thank you PaperCut!

Full release notes below.

25 August 2011 – PaperCut MF 11.4 (Build 14716)

Looking for PaperCut ChargeBack in the UK? You came to the right place.

So what is ChargeBack? simply put PaperCut ChargeBack can help you charge back printing costs to your clients.

PaperCut ChargeBack’s advanced software empowers users to allocate print jobs to specific accounts, allowing you to recover costs from clients, projects and/or departments. PaperCut ChargeBack builds on PaperCut NG by offering the Advanced Popup Client as standard for all users.

Especially designed for the needs of engineering, graphic design, architectural, and accounting firms, PaperCut ChargeBack is the easiest, most comprehensive way to manage and recover print costs.

Key features for professional businesses at a glance:

• A pop-up window actively prompts users to allocate print jobs to accounts, saving employee time, and reducing human error.
• Save time by searching for accounts with keywords. ‘Recently selected’ and ‘preferred account’ searching also available.
• Have greater control by regulating employee access, and monitoring rates and invoice options at time of print.
• Advanced bill-back system automatically emails detailed account, business and invoice reports to nominated persons.
• Quickly import existing account/client/project structures including nested accounts.
• Self-maintaining system requiring minimal administration.
• Control account code access by user and/or group.
• Suitable for Windows, Mac, Linux and Novell, making PaperCut the most flexible and integrated management solution available.

PaperCut ChargeBack’s niche is in technically focused professional organizations. Unlike solutions aimed at corporate and big accounting firms PaperCut ChargeBack is a cost effective software based solution that allows your employees to get their job done and doesn’t get in their way. Systems to bill back printing to clients don’t need to cost more than your printing budget!

The development team have spent a lot of time optimizing the pop-up client software to save commonly used accounts (favourites), add comments to jobs and change invoicing options all in a few clicks.

Reporting is equally as simple. Business invoice reports can be configured to automatically email the accounts person monthly for easy entry or importing into customer invoices.

Want to monitor and charge for photocopies as well? then have a look at PaperCut MF.

Unsure what you need or just need some more information? We will be happy to discuss your requirements please contact us.

 Just a month after the release of PaperCut version 10 we now have a new version to play with.

Version 10.1 brings us some great new features including advanced scriptting, custom printer fields, an update to the mac client and new reports.

The biggest news here is the Advanced scripting feature. 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.

Plus those of you using a Copicode IP can now allow users to associate a new card with their PaperCut account or replace their existing card (I know some of you have been waiting for that)

You can find the newest download links on our product demo pages.

25 February 2010 – PaperCut MF 10.1 (Build 9802) New features:  

Enhancements:  

• CSV reports with date and time representations will now be automatically recognized by popular spreadsheet applications.
• Support for monitoring locally attached printers on Novell networks. Remote queues mapped via IPP are now ignored so only locally attached printers are detected.
• The “Microsoft Office Document Image Writer” virtual printer is ignored by default on secondary server installs.
• Improved documentation on how to set up PaperCut in a Novell cluster.
• Improved the PDF version of the user manual – smaller font, less paper! (But you weren’t going to print it, were you?)
• Improved error message when server-command is attempted to be run with non-elevated privileges under UAC on Windows 2008/Vista.

Fixes:  

• Fixed issue where the user client may in some situations consume excessive CPU if the –minimized option was turned on.
• Fixed a problem in Web Print where PDF files produced by OpenOffice may timeout with unknown error.
• Eliminated the “stale session” error that may have occurred when administrators attempted to log in using Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Printer compatibility improvements:  

Copier / Device Integration:  

Version 10.0 build 9546

If the client software is started with the --minimized option and the account selection popup is enabled, in some rare situations the client may consume high CPU until the window is focused in the foreground. This issue only affects the Windows operating system. A patch is avaliable if required. The alternate solution is to temporarily remove the start --minimized option.

Web Print users may experience issues when printing PDF files generated in Open Office that have a Title added to the document properties. To work around this issue the author of the PDF can unselect Display document title under File -> Export PDF -> User Interface when creating the PDF document.

PaperCut on Debian Linux (netbase 4.39-4.40)

A change in the above Debian version update breaks networking in many applications. The PaperCut application server may fail to start and/or fail to accept connections (i.e. cannot access the web interface). There is contention over whether the change is a bug or the right thing to do. More information and a workaround (set net.ipv6.bindv6only=0) are available in this Debian bug report:

  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=560238

After the fantastic success PaperCut had with the last vote for a feature they are going for another round!

The last Vote for a Feature Survey focused on Big Ticket items. This time they are 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 the type of small features that help out the most.

You can access the latest Vote for a Feature survey via: •Administration console -> About -> Product News.

PaperCut is also 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.

Prior to its launch, Ricoh submitted the m3i Access Module to the Human Systems Engineering Branch (HSEB) of Georgia Tech to see how it would fare against their Section 508 tests. The software itself achieved a Fully Supports compliant status itself. When added to Ricoh MFDs, it improved the compliant status of Ricoh to Supports with Exceptions. However, HSEB did suggest some areas where it could be made more compatible with certain of the assistive technologies they were using in their testing and we have addressed some of these in the latest version.

The change which will probably have the most effect  going forward is the implementation of ARIA mark-up which will improve compatibility with text-to-speech applications such as Jaws. Other minor enhancements have been made in respect of compatibility with Magic Screen Magnifier, Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Windows High Contast Mode. Greater detail can be found on the developer blog here.

It’s not just us that like to sing PaperCut’s praises. Popular website Techrepublic posted an interesting article from an ex Equitrac user who made the jump to PaperCut and hasn’t looked back.

I’ll cut to the chase.  We discovered another product called PaperCut that had been getting very positive reviews on a number of higher ed listservs to which I subscribe.  After a short scan of the market and getting a few members of my staff involved, we decided to give PaperCut a shot.  For what it does, the product’s pricing is spectacular, particularly for educational institutions.  For our 1,500 user licenses, we didn’t end up having to pay much more than we did for Equitrac support alone, so, from a financial standpoint, the decision was a no-brainer.  We moved to PaperCut over the summer of 2009 and have had very few problems, but have enjoyed a great number of the product’s features, including:

• A web-based console used for both administration and user access. Users can very easily get a list of every single one of their print jobs.
• Automatic refunding in the event of a failed print job with no need for IT to get involved.
• Multiple easy ways to add money to a student’s printing account. We haven’t yet implemented what PaperCut calls “TopUp” cards, but we plan to do so.
• No problems working with Windows, OS X 10.4, 10.5 or 10.6. Lack of OS X 10.5 and 10.6 support is what drove us away from the older version of Equitrac.
• Automatic creation of user printing accounts through integration with Active Directory. Under Equitrac, getting new printing accounts created was a true hassle.
• Excellent, intuitive reporting tools, including an “environmental impact” report for each user that provides them with information about how their printing affects the environment.
• A very regular release cycle. Last year alone, there were close to fifteen releases, all of which added features and corrected issues.
• Meager system requirements for the server component – 1GB RAM; Windows, Mac OS X, Linux OS support; and less than 1GB of disk space. We run ours on a VMware-based virtual machine.
• Easy, easy administration.

Read the full article.

We hope you enjoy the new website but with all the changes we now have new bugs and typos to fix.

A few pages need to be completed and some images tweaked…..it is a never ending job.

In the meantime feel free to report anything odd and move the mouse top right for some secret options

The nice people at officeproductnews wrote an article about our m3i project.

Ricoh Americas Corporation, a leading provider of digital office equipment, today announced the availability of Select Technology’s m3i Access Module to the Ricoh channel through the Ricoh Independent Solutions Vendor Program (RiSVP). Exclusively available to Ricoh, the m3i Access Module is an innovative user interface that allows users to control Ricoh multifunctional products (MFPs) remotely in circumstances when using the MFP’s own touchscreen is either not convenient or not possible. While intended to improve accessibility for all users, the interface has been developed to be of special benefit to people in wheelchairs or those with visual impairments. No dedicated hardware is required, just a browser and a network connection, and no software installation is required on external devices.

Follow the jump for the full article - Read More. 

Be sure to check out m3interconnect.com for everything m3i and don’t forget to have a look at the official Ricoh page on m3i as well.

This is a bugfix release for PaperCut MF 9.8, and contains the following changes:  

Enhancements:  

• New option to alert users by email when their refund requests are processed.

Fixes:  

• The advanced client now uses a case-insensitive sort to improve the ordering of accounts that contain a mix of uppercase and lowercase characters.
• Improved web service proxy code and examples on how to use the PaperCut XML Web Services API.
• Fixed regression that caused slow analysis of PostScript spool files when using page-level color detection.

This release includes improvements for print servers running CUPS 1.4, such as Mac OS 10.6 and recent Linux distributions. Customers with such print servers should update to this version when possible.  

Enhancements:  

• Improved low toner notifications to clearly separate which printers are newly low in toner and those that have been notified previously. Also added a new option to only send the low toner notification email when there is at least one new printer that is newly low on toner.
• User client: new option default-account-pin to specify a default PIN/code to be pre-entered on the account selection pop-up.
• Improved user manual documentation for configuring Web Print in sandbox mode.
• Improved credit/balance display on devices when using a custom number of decimal places or unusual currency formats.

Fixes:  

• Improved support for print servers running CUPS 1.4, such as Mac OS 10.6 and recent Linux distributions.
• Fixed PAM configuration issue that may have prevented Unix Standard authentication working on Mac OS 10.6.
• Improved stability of print provider when analysing very large Canon spool files.
• Fixed error running the Printer Environmental Impact report.
• Fixed problem when displaying the pending printer refunds which could cause the paging controls to not work as expected. E.g. the paging controls may not appear even though there was more than a page of refund requests.
• Fixed display problems with Simplified Chinese text in the Windows installer.
• Fixed a problem that could stop the user client from closing when the Exit menu was selected.

Printer compatibility improvements:  

Copier / Device Integration: