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Autopilot - Overview

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What is Autopilot?

Autopilot is PaperCut Hive and Pocket’s automatic print delivery logic. This logic ensures print jobs are automatically delivered to the printer via the fastest and most efficient route.

Much like a plane, when it comes to print delivery, Autopilot does all the work with no interaction from the pilot (that is, you!). For almost all of our customer environments, Autopilot lands the print job at the printer using the right “flight path”. But there will be times when you will want to turn off Autopilot and decide the path yourself. To do this, set up one or more Print Delivery Profiles.

How it works

Autopilot represents the culmination of over 20 years of print expertise, enriched by the cloud knowledge gained from PaperCut Hive and Pocket. While we have incrementally improved our routing logic since our initial release, Autopilot is a complete redesign of our automated print delivery logic.

This system confidently adapts to your network environment, regardless of scale — whether you have 10 end users or 10,000. It prioritizes clients with strong connectivity to the desired printer, focusing less on client-to-client communication and more on client-to-printer interactions. This approach allows the system to operate based on facts rather than assumptions.

For PaperCut Hive, some printer manufacturers’ embedded software requires inbound communication for tasks like access card login and scanning. Autopilot is designed to identify the right client to perform these essential tasks seamlessly.

For new installations, Autopilot is on by default but you can disable it.

Why and when to consider disabling Autopilot

Autopilot has been designed to be lightweight and scalable on both the cloud and client sides. For instance, it minimizes the number of clients attempting to communicate with the printer, which addresses issues where excessive communication could overwhelm the printer and hinder its response.

However, Autopilot might not be suitable for every organization.

One recurring piece of feedback we’ve received over the years is: “I am the Network Administrator, and I understand my environment better than you. Let me specify exactly how to route print jobs across my network.”

Autopilot and customizable Print Delivery Profiles address this feedback and give you ultimate control over how print jobs reach their destination.

Let‘s imagine you are a PaperCut Hive customer with a zero-trust environment. None of your users’ clients have a direct line of sight to the printer. You have a specific client in an isolated network that is the only successful route for print data to reach the printer. In such cases, you can disable Autopilot and create a Print Delivery Profile that explicitly instructs PaperCut Hive or Pocket to use that one client for routing print jobs to Printers X, Y, and Z.

Example Autopilot scenarios

Here are a couple of real-world scenarios where Autopilot excels.

Education

In an educational environment, it’s common to have printers segmented away from end-user devices. However, it’s also quite common for the staff to have their own network segment that has a line of sight to printers, making staff clients viable candidates for Autopilot to route print data through. Autopilot will filter out and ignore the student and guest networks and only call on staff devices for all print data routing.

International enterprise

Customers with offices around the world are often connected with WANs/VPNs. However with Autopilot, as long as Site A cannot see Site B printers, Autopilot will build up a reliable picture for each of the individual sites, ensuring print jobs are routed through clients in the correct office.

Office environment with many hybrid workers

Commonly SMB spaces have a simple network where all end-user client computers can successfully access the printers. Because many staff are in and out of the office, some clients are more reliable than others to be considered in the print job routing path.

So that Autopilot is more likely to select a client that is always in the office, it prioritizes clients that have been reporting as connected in the office for the longest time period. That way, as hybrid worker computers report themselves as in the office, they get added to the back of the line for selected clients as the least reliable routing paths.

Advanced — How Autopilot works in detail

PaperCut clients reports its status to the cloud

Firstly, whenever a client changes network information, it notifies the PaperCut Cloud Service. The cloud then uses its current understanding of the network to provide each client with up to 50 new target clients that the cloud believes should be reachable. This is done so that the clients understand their position in the network.

Once the clients are in contact with each other, they maintain and share local knowledge of this information amongst themselves, so that they are all kept up to date. The length of time it takes for all clients to converge (all have the same knowledge) depends on the size and scale of the network. However, full convergence is not required for reliable print job routing.

Client leader is decided

The cloud service designates one of the clients as the client leader. The client leader is likely to be the client that has been part of the network for the longest time, as this is considered to be the most reliable client. It is also likely to have the most accurate understanding of available clients in the same network.

Client leader notifies the cloud of the best clients for job routing for each printer

The client leader provides the cloud service with a report of the top 20 most reliable clients to be considered for print job routing for each printer. If there are lots of printers to report, then the client leader will do this in stages to prevent excessive network traffic.

The priority of the top 20 reported clients by the client leader is determined primarily by how long a client has been actively reported as part of that network.

Because there is the shared knowledge between all clients, if the client leader drops out of the network, no information is lost and the next client chosen by the cloud service to be the leader can pick up right where the previous client leader left off.

Advanced example scenario — Single office with only one client that can access the printer. Single subnet with limited printer access.

In this example, only one client has access to the printer, however, other clients can communicate with this client over port 9264. Autopilot will have no problem picking this client for print release because all clients know that only one of them can access the printer — so that client will always be selected by Autopilot as the release point.

Remember that one client on site will be designated as the client leader. If, however, the leader goes offline, the other clients will notice this, share this information with each other, and a new leader will be selected. This leader is likely to be the next client that has been active longest in this group. Similarly, if more clients were to join the network, over time they are organically integrated into the list.

Advanced example scenario — Large office of 2000 clients, all clients can access all printers

This example shows how PaperCut Hive and Pocket scale into a large environment. Here we have a wide open internal network, where every client has a line of sight to every printer and every client. To keep internal traffic down and file sizes small, the client leader only provides the cloud service with the top 20 most active clients for each printer.

If, however, the environment is highly mobile, these top 20 candidates might change at a fast pace. In this instance, consider using a Print Delivery Profile with network selection (dynamically selected clients). More on this here! A Print Delivery Profile with network selection changes client prioritization from the historical “time seen in group” method to the reactive “last seen” method. So the most recent clients to report themselves matching the network criteria set in the Print Delivery Profile are chosen by the cloud service for print job delivery.

Advanced example — Multi-site with no cross-site communication

In this example, we have an international company with offices in four countries. There is no cross-site communication. Therefore, Autopilot assigns a client leader for each site. The leader only submits a report of active clients for its designated site, and the cloud combines these reports to create a full picture of the global environment.

Autopilot trusts the local environment to maintain its own client information and printer line of sight, and is much less likely to assign a client to attempt to print to the wrong site.

Alternatively, setting up Print Delivery Profiles lets you define specific print delivery paths for each office explicitly per printer, with dynamically selected clients via network identity, or setting specific clients for each site. For details, see


 




 

 


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