PaperCut MF 8.0 (Build 5428)

This is a major release. Please check the Upgrade Policy for upgrade eligibility. This release also contains a database upgrade and administrators should factor this into their upgrade plan.

New features:

• Added group-based printer restrictions allowing administrators to restrict the use of a printer to a group or set of groups. This is particularly useful on Mac servers, as OS X server does not have in-built group-based access controls.
• Added a new account selection mode to automatically charge a user’s print jobs to a single shared account. This is useful when a user works in a single department or project, as it automates account selection and removes the need to display the popup and run the client software.
• Admin rights may now be assigned at the group level in addition to individual users. This offers more convenient management on sites with a large number of administrators.
• Full support for Apple Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) on both the server and the client.
• PaperCut now supports Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) offering an alternate clustering option in addition to Microsoft Clustering services.
• Added new admin access controls (ACLs) to limit management tasks such as Pre-Paid card management and refunding of print jobs.
• A new set of transaction based reports providing detailed listing and summary of transaction types and amounts.
• Enhanced user account synchronization allowing users’ card/identity numbers to be automatically imported/updated from fields in Active Directory or LDAP.
• The Internet Control module now supports Squid proxy server running directly on Max OSX.
• Mac and Linux base systems can now be configured to run as a “secondary Internet Control server”.
• Improve the format of various CSV reports to make them easier to use.
• Much improved documentation covering Apple Mac setup including deployment on Leopard and using the Workgroup Manager to publish printers.
• … and many more features and improvements since the release of version 7.

Enhancements:

• Changed terminology from “print release station” to “hold/release queue” to better reflect that this feature can also be used via a web browser rather than just dedicated release stations.
• Added total/summary rows to the bottom of all of reports.
• Add a new option to allow the popup authentication to remember the authentication for “this job only”.
• Add more filters to the transaction log pages providing more flexibility searching of the transaction logs.
• Improved the performance of the internal database, by automatically optimizing database tables.
• Added a new configuration option to ignore standard system users such as all users ending in “$”. These accounts usually represent machine accounts. The setting also accepts user-defined regular expressions, providing the power to ignore site specific accounts such as system mailboxes.
• Improved default notification messages delivered to users when their printing is denied.
• Updated system runtime libraries to improve performance and stability.
• Add a web-service API and server-command operation to query the status of a previously started task (e.g. a user sync or backup running in the background).
• Add a web-service API and server-command to retrieve the print job and page counts.
• Added example shell scripts that make use of the “server-command” functionality.
• Improved support for non-compliant LDAP servers (e.g. OpenLDAP 2.2.13).
• Improved support for Arabic languages in PDF reports.
• Updated translations for Dutch, Czech, German, Spanish, Chinese, and Portuguese.
• Improved support for various external devices.
• Add an end-user page to allow users to change their own card/identity number PIN.
• Allow the card PIN to be retrieved/set through the web-service and server-command API.
• Allow the card PIN to be updated/imported using the bulk user import/update.

Fixes:

• Fixed a potential crash bug in the Windows print provider service that may occur with selected printer drivers when the error reporting feature is enabled.
• Fixed a potential crash bug that may have occurred if a misbehaving driver returns invalid data.
• Fixed account selection popup problems that may occur if Terminal Server and popup authentication was used together on the same network.
• Fix a problem where hold/release queue settings were lost when switching between printer tabs.
• Improved reliability when processing badly formatted user or account import files.
• Fix a problem where the account selection popup could display repeatedly on the same desktop.
• Improved error messages when problems are encountered when restoring a database (e.g. running “db-tools import-db”).
• Addressed server load issues that may occur when many print jobs (100+) are bulk cancelled from a blocked queue.
• Fixed a problem where Internet control settings changed by one admin user were immediately visible by other admins.
• Fixed problem that stopped page-level color detection and printer error reporting from working on printers that contain non-ASCII characters (e.g. Chinese characters) in their name.
• Fixed icon display issue when the Mac client was installed using the client-local-install program.
• Fixed issue seen on very large systems where default SQL Server timeouts where halting the upgrade process.
• Fixed problems in the Spanish translation that was causing some unexpected errors.
• Various documentation improvements.

Printer compatibility improvements:

• Improved page counting and copy count detection for QPDL printers (e.g. Samsung ML-2010, Samsung CLP-510).
• Improved duplex detection for selected PCL6 based printers (in particular the IBM Infoprinter 1357).
• Improved duplex detection on recent driver updates for the Kyocera FS9520DN.
• Improved page count and copy count detection with Canon CAPT based drivers (e.g. Canon iR1200/1300).
• Added grayscale detection for the OKI 5600 printer.
• Smarter page-level color detection methods used with selected Postscript drivers.
• Improved page-level color detection when printing and rendering images directly from Photoshop.