Administrators use groups to manage large number of users. Groups are used for all manner of purposes such as reporting, access control and management. PaperCut NG also offers the ability to group printers offering administrators the same level of management advantages they get from user groups. Printer groups are most useful for organizations with a medium to large number of devices.
Printer groups allow administrators to tag or group printers by attributes. Group names are user definable and may represent any attribute appropriate for printer management. Examples include printer type, location, make, function, owner, age, etc. PaperCut NG's grouping is implemented using text based "tags" offering similar flexibility to that seen in many modern online systems such as Flickr - the popular photo management website.
Some examples of where printer groups may be useful include:
Grouping by printer type allowing an organisation to compare volume on inkjets vs. laser printers.
Grouping by floor, departments, or work areas providing comparison reports to identify areas that may need additional printers.
Quickly locate printers by attributes or tags defined by administrators.
Implement fine grained access control by ensuring administrators can only apply adjustments to devices under their ownership/responsibility.
Facilitate group-level management of devices settings such as copying new rules, costs and policies between like devices.
To group printers that support color output the admin will follow the following procedure:
Locate and click a color printer via the Printers tab.
On the printer details screen scroll down to the Printer Groups/Tags section.
Enter an appropriate group name (tag) such as Type:Color. Read best practises in the section called “Suggested best practises for naming printer groups”
Click to save the change.
Repeat step 1 and 2 selecting another color device.
This time select Choose from recent groups and click Type:Color.
Repeat step 6 for all color devices.
An alternate method to apply a set of printer groups to multiple printers is to use Copy settings from printer to printer action.
An important requirement of group management is to have clear and consistent naming conventions for your groups.
This convention needs to be followed by all involved in group management leveraging
the Choose from recent groups link is a good way to ensure consistency.
A group name may contain any character except for ",".
Administrators are encouraged to use a key-colon-value format such as:
Type:Laser
Location:Floor1
Department:Science
Subnet:192.168.4.*
Office:NewYork
Prefixing the value with a type makes it easier to compare and locate groups of interest.
Like user groups, it's important to keep printer groups up-to-date. Ensure someone is tasked with assigning printer groups when new devices are added to your network.
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