Sometimes we get it wrong

Stories from misadventures in rolling out a new printing system, or: Sometimes we get it wrong

Back in January, we started down the path of migrating from PaperCut’s on-premises solution to their fully cloudy PaperCut Hive. Whilst I was initially skeptical about it at first, it seemed like it had enjoyed success in larger organizations, so certainly it should work for a small nonprofit of ~30 people?

Oops. Also, [expletive deleted].

Sometimes we get it wrong. The rollout went about as well as it could go. I’m still frustrated by the fact I had to manually deploy the print client to our users and that the software wasn’t any sort of identity- or directory-aware. Getting a executable file that’s coded in the installer for each user? That’s not nice. Requiring administrative permissions to install that? Go away or I shall replace you with a very small shell script.

What ultimately doomed the rollout for me was that we had users who had sporadic and random issues. There were no common threads among those who had printing errors (other than, presumably, they were trying to print and the day ended in y), so troubleshooting was next to impossible.

Since printing’s kind of a mission-critical task where I am, we made the decision to abandon Hive and go back to MF. And I’m fortunate that I have supportive management and colleagues who understand that sometimes, you get it wrong.

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