Three goals have driven the development of PaperCut’s Universal Print integration:
- Help as many people get up and running on Universal Print as quickly and easily as possible using the printers they have today.
- Make it simple to move from local print servers to the cloud.
- Ensure users still enjoy all the benefits of PaperCut’s print management to track, control and secure print jobs.
To make these good things happen, we’re building native support for Universal Print into our flagship products - PaperCut MF and PaperCut NG.
In other words, you won’t need to install a separate local connector to start using Universal Print.
PaperCut’s built-in connector
All the cloud IPP-Infra calls and job traffic will be handled by our software internally, creating an easy, seamless Universal Print experience out of the box. And that applies whether you’re already using PaperCut to manage your print environment, or installing us for the first time alongside Universal Print.
How does it work?
Printer publishing
As with the current Preview connector from Microsoft, the first thing you’ll want to do with our connector is choose the printers you want published in Universal Print. Any printers you’re already managing with PaperCut, and any new printers you add, will be available for you to publish.
Job delivery
Once you’ve published your printers, PaperCut will poll the Universal Print service for jobs. And when a job is available, it’ll pull it down from the cloud. You won’t need to open any inbound firewall ports, because all our connector traffic originates outbound - easy!
Find-Me
Here’s where the print management magic starts! Using Find-Me printing, your users won’t have to choose a specific printer when they submit jobs. They can just print to a single PaperCut virtual queue pushed to their local workstation by Universal Print. They can then release print jobs from any printer available to them.
Secure release
When your users print, you need to know those print jobs are secure all the way from client device to printer output. Universal Print has this locked down for job submission and delivery to the connector. But we go even further.
PaperCut makes it easy for users to authenticate to printers and MFDs using their AAD identities: either with smart cards, pin codes, or even biometric authentication if you’re running fingerprint readers or retinal scanners.
Quotas and charging
PaperCut’s built-in connector for Universal Print will also support our quota and charging features. From ensuring students print responsibly with per-page charging against prepaid balances, to aggregating departmental print usage monthly to charge back cost centers across your business, PaperCut makes it just as easy on Universal Print as it was on your old print servers.
This is great! How do I get it?
While Universal Print is in Preview, we’ve made our connector component available as a separate download you can add on to your PaperCut MF or NG installation.
You can download the PaperCut Universal Print connector component from our website now, so take it for a test drive and let us know what you think!