PaperCut Version 12.0
Another year, another major release.
2011 was a busy year for everyone and saw PaperCut v11 expand its feature set beyond expectations. PaperCut v11 had twelve releases, the highlights of the previous year’s work were:
- iPad Printing support
- Web Cashier
- Delegated print release
- New web payment integration options
- SNMP hardware checking for print jobs
- Print job watermarking now supports a wider variety of printers and drivers
- A new admin dashboard
- Plus a heap of other enhancements, fixes and embedded tweaks.
So what’s new?
PaperCut 12.0 adds a regularly requested new feature, automatic conversion to duplex and grayscale. Before v12, PaperCut could only disallow all single sided (simplex) and colour printing jobs on a printer, but now jobs can be magically converted to duplex and/or grayscale. This will be useful for enforcing print policies such as only allowing students to print in duplex. The conversions can also be added to a script and the only limit there is your imagination. The PaperCut Dev team have worked long and hard on this and they look forward to getting feedback over the next few weeks.
Also thrown into v12 is a new report, we call this the Executive Summary. This gives, in a single page, an overview of some useful metrics about printers, users and their jobs.
The eagle eyed amongst you will notice a new icon for the client software and the end user web page has finally been updated to match the admin dashboard. We also have a new custom dashboard widget this will allow an administrator to add a link to an external application for easy access from the administration dashboard. Last of all we have a bunch of new scripts and improved translations. Let’s not forget the usual mix of fixes as well.
- automatic conversion to duplex and grayscale
- end user webpage
If you have a current subscription to our premium upgrade assurance plan you may upgrade to version 12 at no additional cost.
What next?
Top secret! But we will have support for a new embedded platform very soon. We will also be looking to improve our driver support for automatic conversion as and when users report issues.
Full release notes below.
20 January 2012 – PaperCut MF 12.0 (Build 16353)
This is a bugfix release for version 12.0 and contains the following changes:
Enahancements:
- Added the option to filter reports by the “[Internal Users]” group.
- On a server with multiple network interfaces, the PaperCut primary server may now be configured to listen on one specified interface (rather than all).
Fixes:
- Fixed issue that could cause print job redirections to fail (e.g. for load balancing or Find-me printing).
- Fixed layout of Executive Summary report when displaying very long printer names without any spaces.
19 January 2012 – PaperCut MF 12.0 (Build 16338)
New features:
- Conversion Filters – This feature provides the functionality to convert colour jobs to grayscale and simplex jobs to duplex. E.g. convert jobs on high volume printers to duplex to save paper, automatically convert emails printed in colour to grayscale.
- New Executive Summary report providing organization-wide summary statistics and environmental impact.
- The user web interface has been updated with a new modern look.
- PaperCut has a new icon!
Enhancements:
- Added support for a new custom dashboard widget to display customer/site specific messages/notices to administrators.
- Web Cashier:
- Operators can now look up users by card number (including though use of an attached card reader).
- When a purchase would take an unrestricted user’s balance below $0, a confirmation message is now displayed.
- When restarting the application server on large sites the reconnection of secondary servers is now staggered to prevent high load.
- New advanced print scripting scripts and snippets:
- snippet for denying jobs printed out of hours
- script to convert email printing to grayscale
- when printing a large job, ask the user if they would like to automatically convert to duplex to save paper
- New translations for Danish and Polish, plus significant updates to French and Spanish.
- Internet control: Added a config option to swap the sent and received bytes parse from proxy log files.
Fixes:
- Fixed problem using Web Cashier with Swiss Francs.
- Fixed problem when logging in to the PaperCut App for iOS if the username is entered containing uppercase characters.
- Disallow printer scripts setting the print job costs to NaN (not a number). This resulted in failing to record the print job.
- Fixed display of printer hardware check related screens in some languages.
- Fixed issue disabling pay stations from the Devices tab in the administration interface.
- Fixed the Rates page in the user web interface to display only printers.
- Fixed minor status reporting problem when testing shared account imports.
Printer compatibility improvements:
- Fixed page count detection for TOSHIBA e-STUDIO 855 PostScipt duplex jobs with odd numbers of pages.
- Improved page size detection for Adobe InDesign documents printed to Xerox PostScript printers from Mac.
- Fixed page count detection for HP LaserJet M4345 MFP PCL6.
- Improved grayscale detection in Sharp PostScript printers.
- Added page size detection for NEC MultiWriter 8250N printer.
Copier / Device Integration:
- Value loader devices supporting user self-registration: Added an option to use the swiped card number as the username of the created user.
- Sharp Onboard/Embedded (OSA): Fixed a problem that could cause the “Unable to enable device” error that could appear if the user double clicked the “OK” button on the account confirmation screen.
- Xerox Onboard/Embedded (Network Accounting / JBA): Enforce the group-based access controls to login to the MFP device.
- Xerox Onboard/Embedded (Xerox Secure Access): Added support for USB card readers supported on some recent Xerox MFPs.