Do I need a User License Exception for PaperCut NG?

Can you apply any of these solutions to help manage your user count within PaperCut NG? If the answer is no, then you may be eligible for a licence exception.

Due to the PaperCut NG licensing model being structured based on the total user count within the PaperCut database, it is important to know how to control and manage the imported users within the PaperCut software. This management can be a manual process undertaken by your Systems Administrators or it can be automated / filtered depending on the structure of your sync source.

Below are a few recommendations on how you can manage this within your company.

NOTE: As of 1st April, 2019 - our MF licensing model has changed. If you’re thinking about needing a license exception and you’re using PaperCut MF, then reach out to your reseller or ASC to have a chat about options. If you don’t know who this is, their contact information should be on the ‘Help’ tab (or ‘About’ tab in earlier versions) of your PaperCut admin interface. Otherwise, if you don’t have any luck there, reach out to us at sales@papercut.com .

Groups

This is one of the best ways to help manage your users within your organisation. Using your AD or LDAP groups allows you to specify which groups in your system you want PaperCut to synchronise against.
This is the most flexible method for user synchronisation, as it allows you to assign each user account a group membership. This group membership will then dictate if the user is synchronised in PaperCut and have an account created for them or not.
Using Groups will also allow you run a destructive sync, to remove any users from PaperCut that no longer exist within your synchronisation group. This means that if a staff member leaves the company, or no longer has a position that requires them to have a PaperCut monitored account, you can easily remove them from the Group and have them removed from PaperCut in a simple, easily administered method.

Organizational Units (OU’s)

This is another simple and effective way to manage your user count. You can filter the synchronised users at the OU level. This means that you can set PaperCut to only pull users from an OU in AD or LDAP, instead of pulling all users from your system.
Using this method will allow you to select the locations where your user accounts exist, whilst excluding the “System, Users and Built In folders,” which by default contain the system and local server accounts.
Again using this method, it can be easy to manage your end users, as it allows you to specify containers that will be synchronised. Therefore, when a staff member departs, you can move their account to a different OU (eg: Departed Staff) and exclude this OU as a synchronisation source.
You can then have PaperCut run a destructive sync against your AD or LDAP and remove these users from the system.

On Demand User Creation

If you find yourself in a situation where it is not possible to use the above methods to maintain your accounts, an alternative could be to use On Demand User Creation. With this solution it would enable your users to create an account in PaperCut when they first send a print job. Via this method it would then ensure that you are only tracking active users within your system and therefore are not paying for user accounts that never print (ie: Built In Administrator account).
In order to configure the PaperCut system to enable On Demand User Creation details can be found at the following site:
https://www.papercut.com/products/ng/manual/common/topics/sys-user-group-sync-on-demand-user.html

For simplification of your PaperCut NG implementation, you may also want to conduct an initial one off sync with your sync source to import all users in your network and then enable “On Demand User Creation” for any new staff that work at your company.
You can then run the system in this manner for 30 days. At the end of 30 days you can follow the below steps to remove any inactive users from the system. This solution will then reduce your user count down to your active users.

The steps to take over the the 30 days would be to get the system running with all of the users synchronised into PaperCut NG from your sync source. If the user count exceeds your licenced amount, you will have 40 days to reduce the total under your licence limit.
Once the initial sync has been completed, stop the synchronisation with the sync source. Let the users print via PaperCut for 30 days. At that point you need to run an export of the users to identify the “Active” users in the system. This can be achieved via:

• Log into the PaperCut Admin Interface
• Go to the Users tab
• Click the Export to CSV
• Sort the users via the column “Last Activity” with the newest dates listed first.
• As not all of the imported accounts will be used to log into the system, there will be a number of users that will not have a date next to their names. It is these users that we want to capture. Scroll down through the list until you find the users with a blank field next to their names in “Last Activity”.
• Copy the usernames of the users that have not printed to column B of a new Excel document.
• In this new document, in the first column (Column A) enter the following command: server-command delete-existing-user
• Drag this command all the way down the first column so this command appears in front of every username in your list.
• Copy column A and column B and paste them into Notepad or similar plain text editing software solution.
• You should now see each line will contain: server-command delete-existing-user {username}

Where {username} is the user account name that we wish to delete.

• Save this document as a batch (.bat) file. So you could call it Delete_Users.bat.
• This file needs to be placed in the PaperCut directory on the server (in the following location): [app-path]\server\bin\win

The standard location on a server for this would be: C:\Program Files\PaperCut NG\server\bin\win
Take a backup of the existing system, in case a restoration is required.

• Log into the PaperCut Admin Interface

• Go to Options > Backups

• Database Export > Export Now

• Once the backup is successfully completed.

• From an elevated command prompt, run the batch file from the “[app-path]\server\bin\win” folder. This will then remove all of the listed inactive users from the PaperCut installation and should reduce the user numbers down to the actual active users.

  NOTE: If you have a large number of users to remove this process should be conducted outside of the business hours, as it can take a long period of time to complete.

Any new staff or staff that have not printed in the initial 30 day period, will have to self associate to register their name in PaperCut.

https://www.papercut.com/kb/Main/ApplyingForAnException