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Thread: Printer Queue management software

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    Printer Queue management software

    For my sins I am on the Parent Councel at my daughters school (primary school, 5-12 year olds - 800 of the little blighters). At last nights monthly meeting the head teacher was having a winge about how much paper/ink the kids consume. Some teachers seem to be far more liberal in controlling (or not as the case seems to be) what the kids print than others and he was asking if anyone knew of a way to monitor who is printing what and how much .... so all eyes in the room turned to me. Now I have to admit, that whilst I am a computer geek, print servers and queues are not something I've ever worked on.
    What they are looking for is a piece of software which will monitor the print queue's and issue reports showing who is printing what.
    As far as I know all the kids have unique logins but the logins they use are the same irrespective of the class they are in at the time and they can use any of the computers in the school.

    Is there a way that a teachers id can be tagged onto the kids print job so that a report can be generated by teacher rather than by child? Head teachers thinking is that if he publishes how much paper is being consumed on each teachers shift then they might be a bit more careful about what they are letting the kids print and this will help to keep the costs down for paper and for ink.

    The head has already approached the local authority but they told him if he wants to do that then it's up to him, it won't be supplied or supported by them.

    Any input gratefully received

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    radix lecti dave87's Avatar
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    Re: Printer Queue management software

    Papercut is what the Uni uses - seems to keep printing to necessities only

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    jim
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    Re: Printer Queue management software

    We had a system like that at school, except it set quotas for each student.

    More than anything, it caused widespread "hacking".

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    Jay
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    Re: Printer Queue management software

    I used to use Papercut, it works by giving each user a set amount of print jobs and shows reports of paper use etc. If the teachers have set rooms with set PC Hostnames then it could generate reports based on the hostname and not the user name.

    Quote Originally Posted by dave87 View Post
    Papercut is what the Uni uses - seems to keep printing to necessities only

    doh, beaten to it.
    □ΞVΞ□

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    Re: Printer Queue management software

    There's a free PaperCut Print Logger too, which will be fine if all they want is to track jobs.

    PaperCut NG does all the logging and lets you set up a credit system, allowing people to only print to a certain value in a given time period. You can give discounts for black and white and duplex prints.

    If it's of any use to anyone, PaperCut NG is available for free if you have 5 computers (or users, I can't remember) or less.

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    Re: Printer Queue management software

    papercut looks quite promising, thanks for the pointers!

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    Re: Printer Queue management software

    One sugestion is get rid of the inkjet printers if not needed, get a decent laser printer if most of the printing is black and white.

    Another vote for papercut



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