If you’re looking for the procedure on setting up print delivery, head over to Configuring Print Delivery Profiles .
What is Autopilot?
Autopilot is PaperCut Hive and Pocket’s improved print delivery logic. This new logic incorporates lessons learnt from the previous version of the logic and is smarter than ever, ensuring print jobs are 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 90% of our customers, Autopilot lands your 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 .
Why improve the original print delivery logic?
The previous print delivery logic was not scaling as efficiently as we would have liked in larger, more complex environments. Initial enhancements were introduced to the existing logic such as “origin node” and RAW9100 print delivery — but we felt that a fresh approach was required to meet our customer expectations, regardless of how complex the printing environment may be.
Enter Autopilot. Most customers expect PaperCut Hive and Pocket to work ‘out of the box’ — and with Autopilot, that’s the case.
However, by also adding Print Delivery Profiles, we’ve given the admin all the print delivery path power. You can tell PaperCut Hive and Pocket exactly which client should deliver the job to the printer, for example via specific clients or via dynamic network assignments. However,
When should I disable Autopilot?
Autopilot has been designed to be as lightweight and scalable as possible on both the cloud side and the client side. For example, we’ve reduced the number of clients attempting to communicate with the printer, which we found could overwhelm a printer, leading to the printer being unable to respond effectively.
That said, Autopilot might not suit every organization. After all, over the life of PaperCut Hive and Pocket, one piece of feedback we have received more than most is: “I am the Network Administrator and I understand my environment better than you. Let me tell PaperCut exactly how to get a print job across my network, in the way I want”.
We took this to heart by implementing both Autopilot and customizable Print Delivery Profiles — giving you ultimate control of how print jobs gets to 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. Rather than Autopilot finding that one client, you can disable Autopilot and set up a Print Delivery Profile to tell PaperCut Hive explicitly, “Use this and ONLY this client for print routing to Printers X Y and Z”.
What exactly are Print Delivery Profiles?
This page describes everything you need to know about Print Delivery Profiles. If you’re ready to set them up, head over to Creating Print Delivery Profiles .
When a print job is delivered in PaperCut Hive or Pocket, the route the job takes from the client to the printer is determined either automatically by Autopilot (default setting), or via a custom Print Delivery Profile.
A Print Delivery Profile is a printer settings feature that allows administrators to control and determine the exact route a print job will take when released via PaperCut Hive or Pocket, either from the mobile app or printer-embedded application.
The feature allows you to set priority clients (release candidates) that are chosen first to deliver a print job for a specific printer. Alternatively, you can set specific network conditions, where any client reporting those conditions is selected as a release candidate.
As a fallback, if the set Print Delivery Profiles do not find any valid candidates at the time of release, you can use Autopilot. Autopilot is our way of automatically detecting and selecting the best clients to send the print job to the printer.
In the future, Cloud Delivery will become available for some brands. This is where the printer downloads the job directly from the Cloud Node, removing any need for onsite routing.
When do I need to Create a Print Delivery Profile?
All printers, by default, come out of the box with Autopilot set on each printer.
However, based on your organization’s unique needs, you may want to take the steering wheel and have full control of how jobs are routed to printers through certain computers. This lets you reduce network congestion or have a specific security stance — and for organizations with these needs, a Print Delivery Profile can be a good option.
Not sure if a Print Delivery Profile is a good fit for your organization? Check out the following scenarios to see if they sound like your organization:
- The Job Log Activity indicates there are no edge nodes that could print the job.
- You want to reduce traffic across WANs to reduce congestion.
- You want to route jobs through specific clients (nodes) due to security and efficient routing.
Scenario: The Job Log Activity indicates there are no edge nodes that could print the job
If the Job Log Activity reports “Failed: no edge node could print the job”, it means the printer your user tried to print to doesn’t have any clients (edge nodes) that can connect with it to send the print job.
Sometimes, this means that not all connections are open according to our system requirements . If some are open — but not all — this could mean the route of a client to a printer may be seen but when tried via our print protocols, it fails!
To fix this, create a Print Delivery Profile and specify which clients can communicate with the printer. This tells the system which clients to use for routing the print job from the computer to the printer.
Once you’ve set up the Print Delivery Profile, do a test print to see if it works. If the print fails, double-check that you’ve selected the correct clients for routing the job.
Scenario: Reduce traffic across WANs to reduce congestion
Reducing unnecessary traffic between WANs can be essential if you’re looking to make efficient use of network resources, reduce congestion, and improve print performance.
Specifying a client (or multiple clients) that can connect to the printer in the same subnet reduces the need for print jobs to travel from one WAN to another.
Once you’ve created a Print Job Delivery Profile, give it a test and see how it goes. After you release a print job, you should see the clients you used in the Job Log Activity of a print job.
Scenario: Route jobs through specific clients (edge nodes) for security and efficient routing
Here are some examples of how a print job flow can differ from site to site:
- In an office HQ, you may be happy for print jobs to go through only one client (edge node) in your network, and this satisfies the security stance in your organization.
- However, in satellite offices, you want print jobs to go to any client that the printer has direct line of sight to, as this allows for the most efficient printing in any office.
To cater for both scenarios, you can create a Print Delivery Profile for each printer that can communicate with the clients chosen in the profile.
In this scenario, let’s say the HQ office has one printer network, and users are in a separate corporate staff WiFI network. The printer network and the staff network don’t communicate with each other. To enable print jobs to be sent from the staff network to the printer network, in a Print Delivery Profile set up a priority client in the printer network and also enable the Cloud Node. Or if selected computers can access the staff network, you can also define a subnet-based rule to allow any client that has the same gateway IP and Mac address to be used to route the print job.
For your satellite offices, let’s imagine there are 3 offices. Each is in a different location.. In this scenario, you’d create 3 separate Print Delivery Profiles. The profile for each office should include defined clients based on how network access looks from client to printer. Generally, using a subnet-based rule will help improve the redundancy of the print system.
In the end, with the 4 Print Delivery Profiles in use, jobs are routed based on the clients and rules you’ve defined, improving your security stance and ensuring print jobs land on the client computers you want to be used in your organization.
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