My company would like to start capturing printing costs. Is there a way to configure the printing interface to prompt users for a billing code? -- David Sonenberg, CCNA, GCIH Manager, Information Technology Stroz Friedberg, LLC 15 Maiden Lane 15th Floor New York, NY 10038 Tel 212.981.6527 Fax 212.981.6545 This message is for the named person's use only. It may contain confidential, proprietary or legally privileged information. No right to confidential or privileged treatment of this message is waived or lost by any error in transmission. If you have received this message in error, please immediately notify the sender by e-mail or by telephone at 212.981.6540, delete the message and all copies from your system and destroy any hard copies. You must not, directly or indirectly, use, disclose, distribute, print or copy any part of this message if you are not the intended recipient.
On Wed, 2006-07-05 at 10:42 -0400, David Sonenberg wrote:> My company would like to start capturing printing costs. Is there a way > to configure the printing interface to prompt users for a billing code?The best thing is to assign a username/password that identify a user and then use a system like pykota[1]+cups to bill per user. Prompting a user requires some binary running on the client plus some way to communicate to this binary from the server when it receives a print request (another method is an authorization system through a web interface that you must go through before any print). This makes up a complex system to maintain and cumbersome to use. Simo. [1]: http://www.pykota.com/ -- Simo Sorce Samba Team GPL Compliance Officer email: idra@samba.org http://samba.org
> Thanks, but that really won't help. We need to be able to link each > printing job to a specific billing code, and user. Each user needs to > be able to work on multiple billing codes.You could always roll your own through a web interface. That is, have users print to a file, and then upload that through a web interface which requires them to fill in all the fields you need for accounting, for instance: username, billing code, project, target printer, number of copies, paper size, paper source, etc.. It wouldn't be terribly difficult to write but would be a minor PITA for the end users. Especially because you'd have to do something to keep the end users from ever printing directly to the printers and so bypass the accounting system. If you trust the end users (typically a really bad idea) you could also just have them punch the accounting numbers into the web interface and still print directly to the printers. Or put a sign up sheet on the printers (and pity the poor soul who has to decipher the resulting scribbles.) Regards, David Mathog
On Wed, Jul 05, 2006 at 10:42:16AM -0400, David Sonenberg wrote:> My company would like to start capturing printing costs. Is there a way > to configure the printing interface to prompt users for a billing code?You could use PyKota + PyKotIcon available from http://www.pykota.com to do this. Both are available under the terms of the GNU General Public License of the Free Software Foundation. PyKota runs on the print server side. It manages print accounting and printing quotas. PyKotIcon is a client side helper with which you can ask for any information to the end user, for example a billing code, whenever a print job passes through PyKota. This billing code can then be used by PyKota to overwrite the one optionally present in the job ticket (if you printed for example with 'lp -o job-billing=YourCode') bye Jerome Alet
On Wed, Jul 05, 2006 at 06:03:34PM +0200, Jerome Alet wrote:> On Wed, Jul 05, 2006 at 10:42:16AM -0400, David Sonenberg wrote: > > My company would like to start capturing printing costs. Is there a way > > to configure the printing interface to prompt users for a billing code? > > You could use PyKota + PyKotIcon available from http://www.pykota.com > to do this.Sorry, I forgot the following disclaimer : "Since I wrote both of these software, my advice about them is probably far from being impartial." hth anyway Jerome Alet
(Re-posting because I was too stupid to change $subject as needed) On Thursday 06 July 2006 13:08, samba-request@lists.samba.org wrote:> Message: 29 > Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2006 11:29:23 -0500 > From: Don Meyer <dlmeyer@uiuc.edu> > Subject: Re: [Samba] Print Cost Capture > To: "Samba User's List" <samba@samba.org>[...]> The catch is that it was written around LPRng. A couple times now, > I have attempted to modify (update) the system to use CUPS -- but > I've always been stymied by the lack of any functions to move jobs > from one queue to another.Uuhmmm.... what makes you think that you can't move jobs from one queue to another when using CUPS? What are your exact requirements when moving jobs? Cheers, Kurt