What is an Evaluation Version?

Evaluation versions provide a way of obtaining and evaluating software, giving users the opportunity to try a program on their own network or computer before buying it. While evaluation versions are copyrighted, and the copyright holder retains all rights, the author specifically grants a user the right to freely evaluate and distribute the program, with limited exceptions. After using the evaluation version for the defined trial period (40 days), the user must purchase a registration key or remove the evaluation version from their system(s).

Release Notes

12 August 2008 - PaperCut MF 8.4 (Build 6267)

New features:

• Native support for iPrint queues on Novell OES Linux. For more information see the associated news item.
• New "Internal Users" feature. This feature allows managing a set of users in addition to those in the configured user directory. It can be used for managing guest users (who may not have a domain account), or in organizations without a directory server.
• New client authentication feature allowing authentication to be remembered forever.
• Allow very large account lists to be efficiently distributed to remote sites with slow network connections. See the developer blog for more information.
• New shared account invoice report to display the detailed print logs allocated to each account.
• Allow display of a custom currency sign/symbol. This is useful in organizations using a currency different to their standard national currency.
• Add support for the UK's Barclaycard ePDQ CPI card payment service in the payment gateway module.

Enhancements:

• A variety of enhancements to the "Bulk Account Operations" feature:
  • Allow changes to be applied to a subset of accounts based on the account name.
  • Allow modifying the account security settings for multiple accounts at once.
  • Allow accounts to be deleted in bulk.
• Large performance improvements viewing print logs and running print reports for sites using the default/internal database. The database settings are now better optimized for database queries that run over large datasets.
• Reduce the amount of client account data downloaded by the client by 25 to 30 times. This could dramatically speed up the loading of accounts over slow network connections. See the developer blog for more information.
• Improved support for Mac OS X when users have multiple "short names".
• Improved performance and reduced server resource usage when the users client downloads large account lists.
• Improved performance when modifying shared account security settings on many (10's of thousands) accounts at once.
• Improved performance of retrieving members of a group from LDAP. This also reduces the number of concurrent connections to the LDAP server.
• Added a new print charging model to charge by "Paper length". This can be used as an alternative to paper area charging for large format plotters.
• Allowed the 'initial creation rules' to be re-applied to either a single user or a group of users. This can be done through the user interface and server-command tool.
• Improved the display and layout of the Shared Accounts list displayed in the end-user web pages.
• Mac/Linux: Automatically populate LDAP settings during installation.
• Added a username filter to the account transactions page, making it easier to find transactions for a given user.
• Improved support for complex domain hierarchies by following "referrals" sent by Active Directory.
• Improved documentation for creating and installing SSL certificates.
• Added new server-command and web services API to list all shared accounts and the shared accounts available to a given user.
• Improved the client launcher "pc-client-local-cache.exe" to more aggressively retry starting the client when problems occur.
• Improved setup/install documentation by adding a separate section for each platform.
• Linux: Add an uninstall script to automate the uninstallation process.
• Updated translations for Portuguese, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Spanish, Italian and Czech.

Fixes:

• Fixed a problem that could stop printing notification messages to be delivered to user clients under some circumstances.
• Fixed a rare problem that could stop a job from appearing in the release station. This problem could only occur when the release station timeout was set to a very long period.
• Improved reliability of the print popup notifications when the user does not exist in PaperCut and needs to identify themselves using the client tool's identity dialog.
• Improved security of the client identity dialog which is displayed when the logged in user does not exist in PaperCut.
• Fixed an error that could occur on the printer charts and statistics page.
• Improved support for processing very large spool files (greater than 1.5 GB) on Windows.
• Improved reliability of page-level color detection of very large images in PCL print jobs.
• Improved reliability and error reporting during scheduled quota allocations.

Page counting improvements:

• Improved page counting for duplex documents for a variety of PCL and Postscript printers.
• Improved copy count detection for the Seiko Teriostar LP-1010L.
• Improved page size detection for custom paper size with PCL 5 printer drivers.
• Fixed page count problem with Xerox booklet printing setting used on the APEOS PORT II - C7500.
• Linux/Mac: Added paper size detection support for the CUPS raster spool file format.
• Add support for the FXPLW language used by the FujiXerox DocuCentre Color 400 CP and other FujiXerox printers.
• Improved page count and page size detection for printing for HPGL plotters.

Copier / device integration:

• Add support for Sharp OSA embedded.
• Add support for Ricoh ESA embedded.
• Add support for Boscop VCC Alpha/touchscreen terminal.
• Add support for using the Boscop Virtual Cash Accepter to add credit to multiple PaperCut instances.
• Updated CopiCode-IP firmware to version 1.2.0.

26 May 2008 - PaperCut MF 8.3 (Build 5959)

New features:

• New set of "Environmental Impact" reports summarizing the impact of user printing.
• Users with access to "Shared Account" can now view balances under their end-user web login.
• Administrators can set a custom message that displays on login screen.
• Native support for IPv6 networks (Yes! We have some University customers that have made the move.).
• New report options allow reports to be run over ranges defined down to the second.
• Added search to the online help documentation.

Performance and Scalability:

This release includes significant performance and scalability improvements, particularly for sites with a large number of users:

• Significantly reduced the memory required to import a large number of users. It is now possible to import hundreds of thousands of users on a machine with limited memory.
• Optimized adding new users on demand (i.e. when a user first prints). PaperCut would previously use too much memory and CPU resources when adding a new user on systems with thousands of users.
• Reworked the database locking code resulting in improved performance under very high load.
• Large speed improvements and reduced CPU usage (up to 1000% on large networks) when retrieving large number of users from Active Directory.
• Improved speed of admin login and display of the user list screen.
• New SQL Server driver configuration that removes Unicode overhead and allows more effective use of indexes.
• Large speed improvements when performing initial user import on a SQL Server database. The import process was modified to allow SQL Server to dynamically create index statistics, resulting in improved import speed.
• Optimized "Bulk User Actions" when adjusting/setting user balances which improves performance by 30%.
• Optimized the "batch-import-user-card-id-numbers" server-command to improve performance when updating large batches of users.
• Reduce the thread priority of report generation. This ensures that running large reports do not impact on other parts of the system.

Enhancements:

• Improved reliability of print popup notifications and message delivery to the user client on systems with multiple network interfaces and IP addresses (multi-homed systems).
• New paper size filter option added to the print logs screen.
• Option to copy printer color detection settings between printers.
• Added a new "noquit" command-line and config file option that prevents users closing/quitting the client.
• Improved audit logging records actions such as when:
  • TopUp/Prepaid card batches are deleted or expired.
  • Configuration settings are changed using the "Config Editor".
• Added more filters to the user list screen and reports (e.g. min/max balance, restriction, office, department and notes).
• Added short-cut keys to the software Release Station which provides improved accessibility to vision impaired users.
• Intelligently shorten the printer names in the printer usage charts so that long printer names are not truncated.
• Added improved support creating TopUp/Prepaid card with Office 2007.
• Increase the bulk user import file size limit to 100MB, to allow for large imports.
• Added an option to always use the "Global email suffix", even when the user record already has an email address defined.
• Net Control: Improved algorithm for checking if a sites is in the ignored domains list. Some customers populated the ignored domains list with 50,000+ hosts and this caused the Internet Control service to run at 100% CPU. The new algorithm can handle this number of hosts with minimal CPU usage.
• Additional information is display in the user client task tray tool tip.
• Upgrade to the latest version of the internal Apache Derby database. This release improves performance on multi-processor systems and provides improved reliability.
• Running "db-tools init-db -f" when using the internal database will backup and re-create the database from scratch.
• Various documentation improvements including more sections to assist administrators with producing their own handouts to educate users about Topup/Prepaid cards, print refunds and using release stations.
• Updated translations for Portuguese, Chinese, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Czech, and Swedish.

Fixes:

• Improved the display of the user client balance window when the display is configured for "Large Fonts (120 dpi)" on Windows.
• We have seen a number of cases of duplicate users/printers appearing in the databases. We have made a number of changes to avoid this from occurring. If a duplicate users are detected they are handled gracefully and automatically removed.
• Do not hide the user client balance window when the user can select "Shared Accounts" but printing costs are deducted from their personal balance.
• Fixed problem normalizing usernames that come from external systems like Novell print queues.
• Fixed error that could occur drawing the user's balance history graph in some circumstances.
• Mac: Fix auto-restart of the user client on OS X 10.5 (Leopard).
• When the license expires allow administrators to access the "Options" section so they can perform limited administration tasks (e.g. backups, reduce user counts, etc).
• Improved how Topup/Prepaid card numbers are generated to ensure no "bad" words can be produced.
• When config settings are changed using the "Config Editor", record auditing information in the Application Log.
• Improved sorting of groups displayed from an external source (like Active Directory). This makes it easier to find groups when there are thousands in the list.
• When "Print All" is selected in the release station, do not print any jobs unless the user has credit for all jobs.
• Improved compatibility with Opera web browser.
• Linux: Improved reliability of installation of CUPS integration components.
• Net Control: Improved Microsoft ISA log processing for SSL/HTTPS traffic. Previously SSL/HTTPS downloads would be charged even if the site was in the "ignored hosts" list.
• Increased limit on number of users that can be imported from Active Directory to 500,000.
• Improve reliability of importing ChargeBack 6.x and earlier account databases.

Page counting improvements:

• Improved color detection for HP Business Inkjet 1200.
• Added Apple Mac support for the EPSON Stylus Pro 4880C (and other drivers using the CUPS raster format).
• Improved support for the Apple Mac Gutenprint drivers.
• Fixed color-detection problem seen on the HP Designjet T610
• Improved page size detection for the Xerox Workcentre M24 Postscript drivers for Mac.
• Improved page count detection for Canon LBP5900 LIPSLX driver.
• Improved page count detection reported with recent Xerox Phaser 7400DN Postscript drivers when printing from Adobe applications.

Copier / device integration:

• Simplify administration by allowing device price line configuration to be copied between devices.
• Fixed a problem with the Boscop Virtual Cash Acceptor that could occur when a user did not add cash to their account.
• Added a cash reconciliation report which can be used when reconciling credit added using "value loaders" and "cash acceptors".
• Update CopiCode-IP firmware to version 1.1.8 which adds support for a coin unit to add credit to user accounts.
• Fixed problem where the Boscop Virtual Cash Controller would stop working if invalid configuration data was given.