Previously our experience with Paxton systems has been based around HiTag2 card technology after a meeting with a local college who just had the net2Access system installed. It seems Paxton also issue MIFARE cards. This is good news as MIFARE is a very popular open system.

So if you are looking to get a new Paxton system installed, then we suggest you go down the MIFARE route to make integration with other systems such as PaperCut and m3i easier in the future.

Oh, and we can also get PaperCut embedded up and running with Paxton fobs.

 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:  

A few weeks ago one of our PaperCut reseller buddies came to us with a problem and (insert sound of own trumpet being blown) we delivered a solution.

Problem?

A few of the schools this reseller provides services to wished to monitor prints and copies on Ricoh machines. They wanted staff and students to be issued with wireless contact cards and for users to walk up to the copiers “swipe” the card and be presented with two options: 1) release any prints sent to the device by the user; 2) start photocopying and have everything be charged to a central store.

PaperCut MF and Ricoh Embedded were chosen and everything should have worked fine apart from one small issue. The cards they had issued staff/students with were “Paxton cards” from the Net2 Access system.

Answer?

The first task was to find a reader that could read something unique off each card.
Second task was to get this mystery reader working with a photocopier (something of a black art)

I will skip all the boring bits but after a few weeks of hard work, tweaking, cursing and generally finding the rest of the world useless we now have a system in place for this to work perfectly. At the same time we learned a lot about card readers on the Ricoh platform and we are fairly confident we can now get any card reader working.

So if you are using Paxton HiTag2 class cards and want to start using PaperCut MF give us a call and we will make your day.

Clever stuff, huh?