Migrating to PaperCut MF or NG from other solutions

Please note if you’re a current PaperCut customer and you’re looking to migrate your Application Server, hop over to the Plan your PaperCut Application Server Migration article.

If you were previously using a 3rd party print management solution (for example PCounter, PrintLimitPro or Bear Solutions or others) and you’re now looking to move over to PaperCut, we’ve listed some ways in which you can move or migrate your data over - to save setting up everything from scratch!

Note that this article assumes that you’ve installed PaperCut MF or NG and you’ve got your printers set up.

Users

If you have a user management directory like Office 365, Google Workspace, Windows Active Directory or LDAP etc, we highly recommend syncing the User and Group details from your current directory - check out the Synchronize user and group details article for more.

Synchronizing means that there’s no extra management around group changes, authentication, email address or card ID numbers etc. Everything just appears in PaperCut as you have already set it up in your user directory.

If you do need to manually create and manage users in PaperCut MF/NG, you can use the Internal users feature.

1. Export your user list from your previous print management solution into a format that can be opened in e.g. Excel.
2. Use the Batch internal user import and update page to configure the TSV file (e.g. username in column 1, password in column 2 etc). You can also find an example .tsv file here: Batch User Import/Update Example .tsv files.
3. Save as a tab delimited text file (important that its tab delimited rather than CSV).
4. Use the server command method to import the users as documented in the manual page for Batch internal user import and update.

User balances

If your previous print management system (like PCounter, PrintLimitPro or others) had the ability to track ‘printing quotas’ for individual users, then you might want to re-instate those balances in PaperCut MF/NG too. Alternatives include setting up new user creation rules which could give all your users a set balance when they’re created in PaperCut - or you can use bulk user operations to set all your users to the same balances depending on group membership etc.

However, if you’re looking to transfer over the current balances that each user has, a simple batch import into PaperCut MF or NG should do the trick:

1. Export the user balances from your previous print management system into a format that can be opened in e.g. Excel.
2. Make sure the username is in column one and the balance is in column two.
3. Save as a tab delimited text file (important that it’s tab delimited rather than CSV).
4. To import the balances, log into the PaperCut admin interface > Users > Actions > Batch Import, then upload the file.
5. Job complete!

For more details about the batch-import and batch-update TSV format, have a look at the Batch import and update user data page in the manual. You can also find example .tsv files (available as a .zip file download) on the Batch User Import/Update Example .tsv files page.

Shared accounts

Sometimes called accounts, matter numbers, project codes, case numbers, departments or billing codes - whatever you call them, if you have them all set up in your previous system, it’ll save time if you can import them seamlessly into PaperCut MF/NG. Note that if you were syncing your shared accounts or billing accounts from an external system, you can do that with PaperCut MF/NG too: Synchronize shared accounts with external source.

If you’re just wanting a one-off import from your old system, the process is:

1. Export the shared account or billing account list from your previous print management system, into a format that can be opened in e.g. Excel.
2. Edit the sheet so that the first column contains the parent shared account name. See the Batch import and update shared accounts article for the full breakdown of columns and configuration options for the sheet.
3. Save as a tab delimited text file (important that it’s tab delimited rather than CSV).
4. To import the accounts, log into the PaperCut admin interface > Accounts > Actions > Batch Import / Update, then upload the file.

Set up your users to use the standard account selection (if required)

1. Log into the PaperCut admin interface > Users > [select the user] > Details > Account Selection. Here you can set the account selection options you’d like to use.
2. Instead of doing this manually for each user, you can fast track this by performing a bulk users action.

Integrate any existing payment gateways (if required)

1. To find out if your current payment gateway is supported, see the full list of PaperCut Integrations and Customizations. Filter on “Payment integrations” to see the list of supported Payment integration options.
2. Work with your PaperCut Partner to get the Payment Gateway set up, or you can also find our installation guides on the How to set up the Payment Gateway Module article.