[cups.general] Success Story

[Mark Maas]

Hi All,

I want to share with you why I chose CUPS and what it has brought me:

I used to manage an NT print server. The print server was on a 
whopping 128MB, 650Mhz server with SCSI drives. Well it was whopping 
at the time anyway...

It was a hoot to manage, due to the fact that we had to setup two 
printer shares for each printer. One with PS drivers, one with PCL 
drivers. (Some exotic software in our company needed it.)

So we always had twice the number of printer shares then there where 
printers.

Plus our Sales department sometimes thought it would be funny to 
print 300MB powerpoint files to the color printer... 33 times.... 
Not at once, but seperate jobs..... Djeez.
We would see a 20Gb use of the hard drive at such times, not 
seldomly crashing NT because it just had no hard drive space left... 
(Sure we had placed the queue in a different partition, but that 
needs a registry hack. We don't like registry hacking.)

At some point I was the only one left to manage everything in the 
Network and had no more time to manage the day to day things of 
printers. I wanted it to "just work".

So in came CUPS. Running on Debian, with Samba. I went full out, 
with point and click drivers,  virtual PDF printers, classes, and 
all kinds of other tricks.

I ended up with a server that could more than handle everything the 
company trew at it. There where troubles in the beginning, things 
like printing the actual postscript data instead of the printout we 
expected...

But in the end, it worked. Fast, no more troubles, never again. I 
can manage the print server from home with the web interface when I 
need to resolve a problem with a broken printer. I can just add a 
different printer to the class. (That, by the way, is a beautifull 
thing!!!!)

No one has to change printers or choose a different printer, all 
they need to know is where they can pick up the print out.

And those humongous Powerpoint jobs are no problem anymore as well. 
I could set quota's on the printer, so those idi*ts from sales could 
no longer do those stupid things, they then quickly learned how to 
print and handle such print requirements. They had to, because if 
they tried just clicking the print button fourty five times, nothing 
came out...

At the end of every month I can shovel the print cost's of every 
department under the nose of the manager of that department. Like: 
"Hey manager of sales: your department has cost this company X$ in 
toner, Y$ in paper etc this month."

After which they started to use the PDF printer much more, 
(Everything you print to a PDF printer results in a PDF file) 
thereby reducing paper costs. We used about 5 pallets of paper each 
month, now we only use half a pallet!! MY GOD!

All in all, this is a beautifull setup. Thank you very much!

Mark