Hi,
I’m founder of https://www.savapage.org, a FOSS Print Management Solution, and looking for Partners. Please take a look at my Call for Participation and follow the links.
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I’m trying to understand how SavaPage works, users supply PDFs and you post hard copy prints back to them?
Basically, documents are “uploaded” to SavaPage by PostScript Driver Print, plain file (PDF, docx, odt, …) upload aka Web Print, file attachment aka Mail Print, Google Cloud Print or AirPrint. Users can preview their captured documents in an HTML5 Web App (jQuery Mobile). At that point pages can be deleted and rearranged, and the resulting aggregated document(s) is input for several work-flows. E.g. it can be downloaded as PDF (with the regular security options, and an optional letterhead) or put into a print work-flow. Printers are sand-boxed in the Web App, and users can simply select one (no client-side driver needed) and are shown the appropriate printing properties in their browser. They can also create a Job Ticket (typical for bulk printing) to be processed in a print room by a ticket operator. SavaPage adds value with pay-per-print charging and Delegated Print scenario’s, i.e. one person (a teacher) can print on behalf of a group (a class) and each member of the group (student) is charged individually.
This is just the main line. SavaPage has a lot more to offer. It has all the functions of a regular Print Management System, including Pay-Per-Print, Secure Follow-Me Printing, Auditing, PDF Creation, LDAP (Active Directory) Integration, NFC Authentication, On-line Payments (Credit Cards, Bank Accounts), Point-of-Sale Payments, Prepaid Print Cards, etc…
I’m very interested in this application, mainly because I’ve been using papercut for many years and have deployed this for clients in the past.
With Sava print, would installations have to remain on site or can cloud accounts be created that print to local printers?
Sharing this with coopdevs from Catalonia. This might align with their interests – they have a unique association-cooperative hybrid model, discussed here: https://github.com/hyphacoop/organizing/blob/master/informational-interviews/2019-04-25-coopdevs-chat.md
cc @enricostn
Several organizations use SavaPage on top of PaperCut follow-me printing, since SavaPage’s Web Print scales much better for large populations and therefore high concurrency. See this example.
Deploying SavaPage in the cloud and accessing local printers via VPN is technically possible, but take into account that there are cases (print jobs with lots of graphics) where spool files can grow very big (1GB+) and that transfer over the Internet will be a performance and QoS bottleneck. Also, since spool files are server-side generated by CUPS you have to equip your SavaPage server with sufficient cores and memory (which will be a more costly solution for a cloud service). See Print Performance Factors for more details. Bottom line: deploying SavaPage on-site is the most obvious choice. Of course you can bring SavaPage online with Apache/Nginx reverse proxy: see https://demo.savapage.org