Papercut Print/Copy Control Overview
Excess printing incurs huge costs on educational/academic institutions in both hidden and explicit ways. Are you looking for ways to cut back? Over 20,000 K-12 schools, colleges and universities worldwide use PaperCut NG to control costs.
The education IT environment is unique. User turnover is high and networks are dynamic. From its first release ten years ago, PaperCut has always been designed by education network administrators specifically for the education environment.
Why is PaperCut the ideal solution for education?
PaperCut was developed 10 years ago in conjunction with network technicians and staff from a number of education establishments. Many of the current team have backgrounds in education sites and know the challenges involved in managing students (and staff)! We now also target the business market, however education remains our primary focus.
Design
Our education customers play a big part in current development. All new features are defined, prioritized and ranked by all customers via a voting process. Some recent features we have developed specifically for education include Web Print, a printing solution for student owned laptops and faculty/department level charging.
Stability
PaperCut has been in production use on networks with many thousands of users for over 10 years. It has proven scalability and stability. Clustering support has taken this one level further. The largest PaperCut NG site (Miami Dade College, FL, USA) has over 350,000+ users in their network!
Cost
Infrastructure applications can be costly. PaperCut's price and licensing model is structured so that our printer counter system is available to all organizations. We are an engineering driven organization, and have low marketing overheads. We have and will always sell directly to academic sites via our website, so you avoid the margins associated with retail, marketing and reseller chains.
Per-user licensing ensures multiple server networks are not penalized for their existing structure. There are no mandatory yearly contracts or fees.
By reducing paper and toner usage, PaperCut NG usually pays for itself in a few months.
Functionality
PaperCut includes a wealth of functionality for tracking and controlling printing. Many sites start with simple goals and will leverage the more advanced features as time goes on. Some features regularly used by education sites include
- Advanced scripting: Free printing during class time.
- Advanced scripting: Teacher approval of color jobs.
- Advanced scripting: Enforce duplex printing.
- Top-up cards: a simple, cost effective, voucher based student payment system
- Automatic Active Directory synchronization: make use of existing year level and department groups/OUs.
- Customizable web interface: easily integrate with existing college intranet site.
Simplicity
We try to make PaperCut's printer control features simple to use, yet provide the power needed for flexible administration. PaperCut is renowned for its straightforward installation and easy-to-use interface. Some highlights include:
- self applying security permissions upon install
- no backend databases to configure
- automatic detection of new printers, set up based on a template
- zero install deployment for optional client software
As software developers we're big believers in the idea that simplicity and power are not mutually exclusive. PaperCut provides for the simplicity of a straightforward printer log as well as retaining a set of features that will satisfy even the most technical system administrator.