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)

With around 20 changes to embedded software and loads of core software enhancements, fixes and updates 11.2 has something for everyone.  The most notable new enhancement released within 11.2 is the ability to now output details of a user’s department and office history.  E.g. If a user switches department midway through a month, print audit reports showing activity by department will now account for their activity in the old department for the first half of the month and the new department for the second half. The biggest change on the embedded side of things is a revamped interface for Sharp OSA devices and you can expect plenty of new features in the upcoming months to take advantage of OSAv4.

Release Notes

11 April 2011 – PaperCut MF 11.2 (Build 13713)

Managing information costs and reducing waste are two of the challenges facing printer users today. Most sites soon notice that print costs are escalating out of control. This is where we come in.

Since print management dramatically helps reduce the number of pages printed or copies taken or waste paper that gets thrown into the recycle bin, it can make a huge difference on the amount of paper waste. So you can feel warm inside knowing you are doing your bit to save some trees and cut down on carbon dioxide emissions. Another environment and money saving feature is ‘find-me printing’ which cuts down on the number of printers and MFD’s reducing costs for toner and paper and saving on the electricity bill. So what exactly isn’t there to like about print management?

The money saving aspect of print management should make it easy to convince the people that control the purse strings they are making the right choice. Most sites we talk to (even those running external hardware units) easily make their money back in the first year (some even make a profit!!!).

So now you know it’s good to save money and save the environment at the same time but how are you going to implement this? One of the most effective ways to reduce these print costs and improve the productivity of your network printers is to use PaperCut MF.

PaperCut MF is a solid software solution that allows you to easily manage your print assets, to collect usage data by location and device, to identify any waste and simply implement cost recovery and allocation strategies, to maximise your system productivity and that all-important return on investment.

Below are 10 great reasons to get in touch and get setup with a trial of PaperCut.

1: “FindMe” Release Anywhere Printing (Pull Printing to you and me)

Simply put, documents follow users to their printer of choice. Allow your users print to a PaperCut MF “Virtual Print Queue” and regardless of their location they’ll be able to retrieve their print jobs from a networked printer or MFD. This delivers tremendous flexibility when and where needed.

2: Go Green!

Hundreds of report combinations to view, export as file or deliver via email and real-time statistics on CO2, energy and trees consumed by the printing process. PaperCut MF reporting and print controls empower IT departments to control waste. In particular, CO2 and Carbon emission reporting is available at a glance with a handy optional widget or report. The employment of green initiatives is a growing requirement in today’s world.

3: Easy to Manage

An intuitive interfaces make PaperCut easy to administer and easy to use. Regarded as the simplest system of its type to deploy and manage, PaperCut MF delivers. For instance, System Administrators have full access to advanced administration and configuration options via a familiar, simple web interface. This can be accessed anywhere and anytime on your network. Early in 2011 expect a new layout for the UI giving you all the information you need at a glance. PaperCut MF is up to date in both its looks and its architecture.

4: Site Wide Policy Enforcement

Take control of your paper, MFD and Toner usage. With PaperCut MF you can take charge and control “who” prints, “what” gets printed and to “where”. There are even some simple scripting controls available to ensure your staff automatically adhere to the agreed company print policies. These include “duplex print”, “no colour from web” and “job routed to least cost device” as well as “Free printing during class time” – very handy for exam time at school. If none of the pre-made scripts suit you, then you can of course define your own features with a custom advanced printer script.

5: Centralised Administration

Administer the system straight from your web browser anywhere on the network. PaperCut MF provides administration access from any location on your network via a standard web browser. End-Users also have access to a set of web tools that empower students and staff to track and monitor their own activities in real time as well as various tools and log information.

6: Driverless Printing

A driver-less printing solution for laptops and wireless devices. A simple yet very affective feature called “Web Print” allows printing from net-books and other mobile devices. Perfect for “mobile workers” and students with their own laptops with documents they need to be printed. Simply upload the document, select the device on the floor plan and print. Also (but nothing official just yet) iPhone/iPad printing could be on its way soon. We will update the website as soon as we get confirmation. We know a lot of sites handing out iPads these days will be interested in this feature.

7: Scalability

The modern software design and architecture provides scalability for networks of all sizes. Whether your network consists of a single server with a handful of users to a clustered multi server network with 60,000 plus users, PaperCut MF will scale to meet your needs without any troubles. PaperCut is happy to run on Windows, Mac, Linux, Novell (iPrint) and mixed environments and is just as happy to live in a virtual machine.

8: Easy Deployment

It’s extremely easy to install and configure. Simply click next and follow the prompts. The PaperCut MF install process allows you to setup preferences for Users, User Groups, Devices, Cost and Quota’s. It could not be simpler.

9: Monitoring and Usage Reports

Hundreds of report combinations to view, export as file or deliver via email.  With a vast choice of standard reports finding out who, where and how much is printed has now become whole lot easier and the best bit is, it will let you see who is causing all the trouble by printing 300 pages to a USB desk jet printer instead of a large MFD. PaperCut MF provides the tools to monitor the output of your printer and MFD fleet with real time activity reports that can be deployed silently so that staff gets used to the changes in workflow.

10: Secure Access and Release

Running around to retrieve confidential print jobs will be a thing of the past. No matter where you are, print jobs can be collected conveniently from any supported device with either secure user or card authentication.

We had to stop at 10…….but we could go on all day about:

• Dedicated Print release stations.
• Professional client billing – charge back those printing costs to clients.
• Sync across multiple user directories (e.g. a Microsoft Active Directory and a separate LDAP server).
• Shared accounts – charge printing to accounts/departments that can be shared by multiple users.
• Watermarking – apply text to the bottom of each page.
• A bunch of Public APIs to link into.
• Supports Microsoft SQL Server (32 and 64-bit, and Server Express), Oracle, PostgreSQL and MySQL out-of-the-box on all platforms.
• Credit card payments and top up cards to add value to accounts.

And best of all – Capture “off the glass” walk-up copying using embedded software for the following platforms:

• Ricoh, via Ricoh Embedded Software Architecture (ESA)
• Sharp, via Sharp Open Systems Architecture (OSA)
• Xerox, via Xerox Network Accounting
• Lexmark, via Lexmark Embedded Solutions Framework (LeSF)
• Konica Minolta, via OpenAPI
• Kyocera Mita, via Kyocera Hybrid Platform for Advanced Solutions (HyPAS)
• HP, via Chai SOE DSE
• Toshiba
• Gestetner
• Lanier
• Nashuatec
• Triumph Adler
• Olivetti
• With more coming soon!

Interested? Then get in touch.

An early Christmas present from the PaperCut Team. Version 10.7 gives us a shiny new embedded solution for Kyocera HyPAS devices (and in our opinion it is one of the most feature rich embedded options).

You also get an easier method to restricting access to colour printing, a host of new reports and watermarking/job attribution for PCL5 printer drivers, in addition to the existing PostScript support.

Full release notes below.

If you are an existing customer looking to upgrade your current install of PaperCut MF, then please contact us.

Resellers please use the dedicated reseller portal provided.

Full Release Notes: PaperCut MF 10.7 (Build 12373)

New features:

Enhancements:

• Novell OES: Print jobs manually canceled from iPrint queues are now automatically refunded.
• Novell OES: Improvements to cluster install notes.
• Scheduled reports can now be copied. This simplifies setting up multiple similar reports.
• Printer toner information may now be manually updated (in addition to the automatic perdiodic updates)
• Test notifications can now be sent to specific email addresses as well as by entering a username.
• The Windows release station zero-install method (“pc-release-local-cache.exe“) now automatically updates more config files each time it is launched (config.properties and client-machine-aliases.properties), simplifying deployment of multiple release stations from a central location.
• Improved retrieval of device serial numbers via SNMP by looking in some non-standard SNMP locations.
• Improved support for IPv6 when using the Windows Print Services for Unix (LPR and IPP).
• All printing based reports now have an ad hoc filter for printer groups.
• Improved logging to diagnose secondary server connection issues caused by security settings.
• Added a new API for developers and system integrators to allow querying information about the logged in user at devices. This can be used by 3rd parties to implement single sign-on using PaperCut’s authentication.
• Added a full Hebrew translation, thanks to our team in Israel.

Fixes:

• Fixed a problem editing scheduled reports with multiple email recipients which caused the recipients to be saved incorrectly.
• Fixed problem when editing scheduled reports in Excel/CSV format where date range parameters were incorrectly displayed.
• Fixed small memory leak in the Windows print provider service.
• Sensitive fields are no longer logged to the App Log when they are changed in the Config Editor (e.g. SMTP passwords).
• Windows: fixed printing order when a large number of print jobs are released at once (more than about 40 jobs).
• Improved reliability of watermarking on the HP 4100 with PostScript drivers.
• Release Station: Fixed anonymous print release for release stations running in “release any” mode.
• Release Station: Improved support for card authentication when using card header and trailer that are the same character.
• Fixed a problem setting admin rights for user group restrictions that could occur when running on a PostgreSQL database configured with certain locale/language settings.
• Fixed the Shared account print/copy/scan/fax – breakdown report to include jobs allocated to sub-accounts.
• Linux/Mac: Improved reliability of print job redirection (e.g. find-me printing) on very busy print queues.

Printer compatibility improvements:

Copier / Device Integration:

The clever PaperCut developers have been busy putting their Kyocera Mita embedded application through the last stages of testing – At this rate they will run out of embedded environments to work with! We have had a lot of interest in the Kyocera solution so follow the jump at the bottom of the page for more information. This solution is based on the HyPAS platform.

Kyocera’s HyPAS (Hybrid Platform for Advanced Solutions), a powerful and scalable software solution platform, optimizes the performance of Kyocera’s award-winning MFPs through custom, integrated software applications that are designed to meet and exceed users specific document imaging needs. HyPAS will transform your Kyocera MFP into a resource designed to evolve as your business evolves – resulting in enhanced information sharing, resource optimization and an improved pre-existing, as well as future document workflows.

PaperCut MF provides integration with Kyocera Mita MFDs, enabling the tracking, charging or billing of “off the glass” copying, faxing and scanning. The goal of PaperCut Software’s embedded MFD solution is to leverage the capabilities of Kyocera Mita devices to provide walk-up copier users with the same set of rich application features provided in the print control area. These include:

• End user authentication including integration with single sign-on environments such as Active Directory, Open Directory, eDirectory, LDAP and others
• Optional proximity/swipe card authentication (via USB readers)
• Group-based access control to the device and colour copying
• Monitoring and control of photocopying, scanning and faxing (quotas, charging, allocation and logging)
• Allocation of copying, scanning and faxing to accounts/departments/cost-centres/projects
• Releasing jobs from a hold/release queue (secure printing)

Kyocera Mita MFD Integration details.

The Kyocera Mita solution joins the long list of copier brands PaperCut will work with. The PaperCut Software development team have developed solutions for several major copier brands, including:

• Ricoh, via Ricoh Embedded Software Architecture (ESA)
• Sharp, via Sharp Open Systems Architecture (OSA)
• Xerox, via Xerox Network Accounting
• Lexmark, via Lexmark Embedded Solutions Framework (LeSF)
• HP, via Chai SOE DSE
• Toshiba
• Konica Minolta, via OpenAPI
• Kyocera Mita, via Kyocera Hybrid Platform for Advanced Solutions (HyPAS)
• Gestetner
• Lanier
• Nashuatec
• Other devices are currently under development.

For updates and pricing information just get in touch.

The company is about to begin production of a paper tray locking device for certain Kyocera Mita/Utax copiers. The company has now developed paper tray security solutions for 4 different copier manufacturers’ products, the others being: Ricoh, Canon and Sharp.

*update* the Kyocera lock never happened, sorry!