We have HP printers (model M806 and M855) in our Library. We have seen an issue when a student tries to print to A4 or Legal paper. We only have 8.5x11 and 11x17 paper loaded in our printers. When a student tries to print A4 or Legal, the following happens:
- Student gets charged for the print job, but it doesn't print
- Printer goes into a state that requires you to have to touch the screen to cancel the job manually
- If someone doesn’t manually cancel the job, anybody who tries to print afterward will receive a confusing error on the PS200 screen
I wanted to see if there is anything that we can do to lock the drivers/printer/Pharos down in such a way that students can only print to medium that is actually available in the trays (8.5x11 and 11x17).
One additional complication to our setup - we use pop-up drivers for public PCs in the Library. We also have Mobile Print and MyPrintCenter enabled. We disabled the ability to select which printer to release to in MyPrintCenter because we wanted to only have two queues - black/white and color.
Dave
David Alexander,
You may need to test this a bit to make sure that feedback is provided to the end user, but you can set the attributes that each printer accepts which will result in Pharos refusing to release jobs to a printer that does not have matching attributes. For example, if you go to Pharos Admin > Output Management > Devices, then select one or more devices with Print functionality enabled in the upper center pane, then expand the Print section in the lower center pane and click the right column of Job Attributes... you will then be given the option to select which attributes your printers will accept. If nothing is checked all jobs are permitted, but as soon as one box is checked the only jobs permitted through are ones with those attributes.
You will notice that there are paper sizes and job attributes. Typically, paper size is what people want to reject, so just select the common attributes and then the few paper sizes you want to allow. You can look at the attributes of the jobs that typically come through your system in the Queued Jobs context, but here is a sample list of common attributes:
If you find that users are printing custom paper sizes and Pharos is not rejecting those custom sizes, let me know and I can provide a SQL query to adjust that behavior.
Usually the biggest obstacle to this approach is that the end user does not receive a nice pretty message that truly explains to them exactly why the job is not allowed (i.e. a list of attributes that are not permitted). This is why I referenced the need for some testing in order to make sure you are content with the behavior of the system. I am making an assumption that you are using SecureRelease here over direct printing based on your use of MP.
In the end, this may be a bit of a trade off between have a confused user that needs some education on what is happening versus having an upset user that has been billed and a printer that requires intervention. If scripting is your thing, you should be able to mess with that a bit in order to improve feedback to the end user. Custom scripting is something that typically requires a statement of work and/or a quote if the project is simplistic enough, so I wanted to make sure that this is something you were interested in tackling on your own before I go into all of that. There are a number of ways that this could be implemented, it would just be a matter of finding a balance between over-developed and the opposite extreme of unhelpful.
Regards,
Steven