Print rules

Print rules work like filters for your print jobs. You define conditions (“the job has more than 50 pages”, for example) and tasks (“forward it to a particular printer”). That way you control automatically what happens to print jobs — redirecting large jobs to a high-capacity printer, or blocking certain jobs.

Print rules let you control the behaviour of print queues. To reach the overview of print rules, click Printing > Print rules in the menu. There you find a list of every print rule already created; you can edit them, delete them and add new ones.

Permission required

To access this function you need the following permission:

• Show print rules (AdminUI_PrintManagement_ListPrintingRules)

Permissions are granted through groups — see permissions – overview.

In the overview you create a new print rule through the + Create print rule button. Print rules you have created can be deleted individually with the bin icon, or — once you have selected them — all at once through the Delete print rules button.

Creating a new print rule

To define a new print rule you need a unique name and, optionally, a description. You then select conditions and finally specify what should happen when the conditions are met.

You can give not only several conditions but also several tasks. Conditions always trigger all of the tasks. Use the + Add condition or + Add task button for this.

Deleting print rules

If you no longer need a print rule, simply delete it. Select the rules you want to remove next to their names and then click Delete print rules. That way you remove several rules at once.

Alternatively you can choose between Edit and Delete on the right-hand side under Commands.

Examples of print rules

This section gives examples of print rules that are used often.

Deleting jobs

Do you know someone in your organisation who prints every email message before reading and answering it?

The print rule below prevents email messages from Outlook from being printed.

Overwriting job settings

For documentation purposes it can sometimes make sense after all to allow emails to be printed.

In that case, though, they should at least not be printed in colour but in black and white only (monochrome-grayscale), always double-sided (duplex), with at most one (1) copy, and always using the sustainable copier paper from paper tray 4 (tray-4).

Overwriting the job owner

In certain cases it can happen that a print job cannot be assigned unambiguously to a user account when it is submitted. For security reasons, Docuflair would delete all such jobs immediately.

Scenario 1: with automated printing from third-party software, internal user names are often used, or no user information is transmitted at all.

Scenario 2: in bring-your-own-device (BYOD) environments, the user names used on personal devices often do not match the user information synchronised from Active Directory.

To keep such jobs nonetheless, Docuflair offers the option of overwriting the job owner.

The screenshot below shows how to assign every job from the job owner sysadmin to the user admin.

The screenshot below shows how to assign every incoming job to the user shared.

The screenshot below shows how to assign every job with an unknown job owner to the user shared, using the special placeholder %?.

Direct printing

The direct printing rule is used to print every document submitted to a print queue straight away on a printer you select.

In the simplest example you add only one task of the type print and delete job and then select one of the registered printers.

If not every incoming job should be printed directly, but only jobs above a certain page count, add a corresponding condition in front.

The example below shows what direct printing for jobs of 50 pages or more looks like.

The example below shows what logged direct printing looks like, where the user has sufficient credit.

Redirection

In certain scenarios it makes sense to set up redirections between print queues. You might, for example, operate several multifunction devices of different capacity classes in your organisation and want larger jobs to be collected only on the more powerful devices.

For that, set up two print queues and add all the high-capacity devices to the first and all the others to the second. Now create a print rule along the lines of the following screenshot and add it to the second print queue.

Docuflair now moves every job with more than 100 pages into the Pull Print Large Jobs queue automatically.