Print Log Dohickey Progress
For a while now the print system here has needed some TLC on the customer service side of things. The PCounter system that we purchased is really slick and takes care of the very hard part of the problem (counting pages). Unfortunately the accountant’s inability to use the administration program makes the entire package fall short.
In that vein, we’re committed to providing a custom application that will take the data from PCounter and display it just how our accountant wants it. This also has the nice side effect of enabling us to provide a nice way for us to view logs for trends and users to view print quota-like information.
The gist of this process is that PCounter is going to do the “hard” part by counting the pages and then we’re (I’m) going to do the rest. After a few more tickets recently came in asking for printing related information, it seemed that this project might be a little more important than originally expected.
So in a fit of productivity I’ve built a project page for this effort and built the initial data importer. Right now it’s very basic and very inefficient… but works great. It simply checks a time stamp in the db, parses the entire PCounter log, tosses out the rows that are old, shoves any new ones in the db, and updates the time stamp. (The db is something that I had already designed and implemented in previous work on this problem.)
First I think I’m going to work on the sys admin use case and get some nice trend analysis graphs, because that should tackle a few faculty heated tickets that are sitting in my to-do list. After that I figure the accountant use case should get some love.
Anyway, it’s definitely a good evening’s work.