Guest and anonymous user management

PaperCut NG/MF tracks print activity against individual users. In most cases, these users belong to your organization, and user information is synchronized against an external user directory source such as Active Directory, Google Cloud, Microsoft Entra ID, LDAP, and more. If you are able to synchronize your users against an external directory source - this should be your first choice.

There are a number of scenarios where it is not practical to synchronize all users from an external directory. They typically involve visitors and guest users printing from BYOD mobile devices who might not even have access to the corporate wired or wireless networks.

Guest Printing for Business

• Requirement: Need a printing solution for visitors and casual guests - often using BYOD devices with no network access.
• Considerations: Tracking of individual guest users is not important.
• Recommend: Anonymous guest printing (direct print or managed release)

Guest Printing for K-12 Schools

• Requirement: Need a printing solution for visitors and casual guests.
• Considerations: Tracking of individual guest users is not important, but need controls in place to prevent student use.
• Recommend: Anonymous guest printing with hold/release queue managed by front desk.

Guest Printing for Higher Education / Library Pay-for-Print

• Requirement: Need a pay-for-print solution for students and guest users.
• Considerations: Each user has their own account and account balance.
• Recommend: Internal users (users managed by PaperCut NG/MF) with self-registration.

To address these varied requirements, PaperCut NG/MF offers multiple solutions for guest and anonymous printing:

• Internal users (users managed by PaperCut NG/MF) : Internal users are added directly to PaperCut NG/MF and are not synced with an external user directory. Internal users can be added by a PaperCut NG/MF administrator or self-registered.
• Shared or generic users: A shared username and password is provided to guests to allow them to log in and print using company equipment. All guest jobs are logged in against this generic user.
• Anonymous guest printing : Guests not registered in PaperCut NG/MF are permitted to send jobs to a special email address for printing. Jobs are logged against a single internal guest user.

Summary of options for guest printing

There are a number of ways in which guests are handled. It varies from organization to organization and often the approach adopted relates to how they handle guest accounts for other services such as general PC/network access.

Here is a summary of the main options:

Pre-loaded rotating guest accounts

Many organizations also have logins to access the network. They will pre-create a set of user directory (e.g. Active Directory) guest users each with limited rights and random passwords. e.g. guest001, guest002, guest003, …., guest100

Guests users collect and information sheet and/or maybe fill out and sign an network access policy form before being allocated one of these accounts. Guests accounts in some cases are already pre-loaded with printing credit. Accounts are often recycled after a few months. Sites often take this approach if they need to “audit” usage. For example, guest061 access an inappropriate website and they have a record of the real name of the person using this account at that time.

From PaperCut’s perspective, there needs to be nothing special to support this as it’s really just another AD account.

Self-account creation (internal users)

In this scenario, guest users all login to the desktops as a generic user such as “guest”. PaperCut can be configured to display a popup dialog requesting a username and password for printing. If a user does not yet have an account, they can sign up by filling in a web form. A similar process to signing up for say an Yahoo or Gmail account. One the user has an account, they can login and add funds via credit card (via one of our online payment gateway options) or say a topup card/voucher an use this for any further printing or devices access (say at a copier terminals).

Pay and Release

This method relies on release stations with payment hardware attached such as the a coin/note acceptor with optional change unit ( PaperCut MF supports this option with various hardware units). Users print as “guest” and can only release their jobs after loading money at a Pay and Release station. In this setup, jobs can’t be tracked by user and are simply associated with the nominated guest login.

Off-the-glass copiers in such environments are usually managed with coin/cash vending units (such as those produced by Jamex, etc.)

Wireless Laptop/Network Users

Some sites like to offer printing to users via the wireless network direct from their own laptops/netbooks, etc. This is possible with PaperCut’s Web Printing feature. Access is managed via one of the three methods outlined above. Web Print simply offers an alternate way to get the job in to the print queue.