Office Print Tracking feature provides the benefit of collecting information about all print jobs in the environment using multiple different options. Print jobs may travel from workstation to the printer directly (via serial or parallel ports of a computer) - where YSoft SafeQ offers the ability to track the accounting information. For network printers and print servers, where print job travels through YSoft SafeQ, additional capabilities are available above common print tracking. All gathered job information including accounting is then used for usage and cost reports.

YSoft SafeQ uses office print tracking in order to:

• collect information for each job, device, and user.

• collect detailed information for each job: number of pages per paper size (in two sizes: large and normal), number of color/middle color (if supported by a device)/monochrome pages, duplex usage, job title, and originating computer.

• collect coverage information for each job: percent coverage of the page (not white area / total page area), estimated usage of C,M,Y,K toners.

Not all information may be available with every print job or deployment scenario. YSoft SafeQ is typically able to address about 95-98% of tracked pages to individual users or departments. This is most commonly caused by various maintenance print jobs, system status print jobs, direct IP printing, server reboots and limitations of the page meter tracking (vendor-specific limitations). Please review Print tracking methods for more details.

In order to use print tracking capabilities:

• The client workstation must be able to deliver data to the YSoft SafeQ server:

  • Using LPR (supported by most modern operating systems)

  • Using installed and configured YSoft SafeQ Client or Local Monitor 

  • By sending an e-mail or uploading a document using YSoft Mobile Print Server feature

• The client workstation must be able to provide the information about the user's identity in order to authorize the print job using:

  • LPR user identification - user identification is logged by the client system or connected shared printer (see RFC 1179, chapter 7.8).

  • YSoft SafeQ protocol for user identification – user is defined in the YSoft SafeQ Client (see SafeQ Workstation Client Protocol Specification).

  • Print job title – retrieved via LPR RFC 1179, 7.4 or via YSoft SafeQ Client, using a specific format (see RFC 1179, chapter 7.4).

    • The feature is enabled via the configuration option parseUserFromTitle = <user_names>, which is disabled by default. The <user_names> value can contain multiple users, separated by "comma" symbol ( , ).

    • The user name must be provided as a part of the job title, delimited by sign defined in configuration property parseUserFromTitleDelimiter (default values: "dot" or "colon" or "underscore" or "slash" or "backslash" – e.g. USER.title or USER:title or USER/title or USER_title.

    • Position of user name could be specified by configuration property parseUserFromTitleIndex (default value: 1 for USER.title, other possibilites: 2 forsomething.USER.title etc.).

    • There is also possible to keep original job title by setting configuration property parseUserFromTitlePreserverTitle (default behavior is removing user name).

    • Print job title (filename) is by default detected by N, T, J commands of the RFC 1179 (whichever command comes first in the data stream).

    •  Only jobs that arrive with a specific owner identity (that is, a configured user login name) are processed by YSoft SafeQ.

  • PJL command in print job data stream – PJL header in the following form can be used to detect user identity directly from the data stream, for example:

     

    @PJL USER = username

     

       YSoft SafeQ identifies the owner from the header by matching the header to a (configurable) regular expression, therefore the key and the value may contain any string but there must be a way to match them to one regular expression pattern common for all jobs received by YSoft SafeQ. The row must be placed within the PJL header in the print job. 

    • This feature is enabled via the configuration option parseUserFromJob (enabled by default) and ParserPJLUser (default pattern)

• For configuration and deployment information, see Configuring Office Print Tracking.

• Local monitor uses the information from Windows Print spooler. This however requires initial configuration.

• In order to understand limitation of different tracking options, please have a look at the available Print tracking methods.

Licensing

Office Print Tracking is included in every YSoft SafeQ 5 Suite license. Additionally, print tracking is available as a part of the Reporting module.