Printer Status plugin gets a big update
Posted on July 15, 2016
This plugin has been quietly neglected for far too long. There’s been a bit of feedback and feature requests for it recently, and that feedback has been put to good use.
Current changes
- Automatic updates. You’ll need to update once, but it will keep itself updated on a regular basis going forward.
- New view menu for a client level view. There’s a new menu item in the View menu that will allow you to view printer supply levels easily. This includes toner/ink and imaging unit levels, as well as page print counts.
- The view menu also allows you to see printer errors, problems, maintenance needs and more at-a-glance. This information is available for printers detected by network probes via snmp.
- You can also refresh printer information from the network probe while in the View menu to make sure you’re up-to-date.
Upcoming changes
This update prepares the plugin for some more awesome changes coming soon. The plugin will start keeping track of toner levels and page counts so that you can monitor for specific problems and see trend usage over time. This is very useful for companies that want to be aware of low toner before it affects the client, and companies looking to track print counts for billing/maintenance.
Good things already, and more on the way. As always, thanks for the feedback! You can see more about Printer Status here.
this is working great, so thanks for the plugin!
now, can you spoon-feed me a link or the steps i need to take to have this generate a weekly report that lists all clients and which printers have low toner. that would enable me to order the toner PRIOR to them running out. i know its simple, i just cant figure out where to do this in 12.
thanks in advance!
James,
There’s no way to do that via this plugin unfortunately, but all of the information used in the plugin is of course available in the database. The plugin actually just uses the information that’s collected with the network probe and shows errors based on items found in the probeinternal_printererrors table. So you could of course generate a dataview or have a script loop through that table to generate a type of report.
Thanks!
Tim