Print Logging

technicholas
Contributor

Hello,

We have many teachers and students printing we want to log their usage is this something I can manage with Casper?

I want to know who is the top user and who prints the most to the 4200 and not the savins printers.

4 REPLIES 4

mm2270
Legendary Contributor III

Look into PaperCut (http://www.papercut.com) Does this and a ton more. Several people on these forums use it.

Casper Suite doesn't manage printing usage. That's not to say you absolutely can't roll your own solution with scripts, Extension Attributes and such, but if you want something that works and is supported, look at the above.

GabeShack
Valued Contributor III

Since Jamf continues to add features I wonder if this is a feature they may look to build into the furture.....
Would be nice...
Gabe Shackney
Princeton Public Schools

Gabe Shackney
Princeton Public Schools

mm2270
Legendary Contributor III

Well, perhaps. no way to know if something like this is on their radar or not (unless they comment on it)

But, if you wanted to get a basic idea of how many print jobs are being sent from each Mac by day, I suppose you could build your own solution as I mentioned above. For example, you could cycle through mapped printers and get a count of completed jobs from each separated by day. The biggest problem I see though is how to actually report on it? Pull it into an Extension Attribute? Perhaps, but you could be looking at hundreds of lines potentially, so its not the most efficient way to do it. Could even cause some issues with your Casper db if the data it collects gets too large.
Maybe send the output to a local file? But then you'd still need some way to collect that into a central system you can look at and report on. You could probably script it to curl the resulting file back up to a server somewhere. At this point though we're starting to get into crazy hackish methods. :)

Something like the Application Usage pie charts in Casper would be the ideal method rather than a huge list, but I don't know if there's an easy way to do something like that.

Mike35
New Contributor

Hi technicolas,

check also startup market - fast growing companies like http://www.ezeep.com/
companies offer easy-to-use software with Cloud-Managed-Printing. Thanks to Print Management Software your school office management can save time and reduce costs of printing.

More about Printing Management: http://www.ezeep.com/blog/