Tech News

Reports - No need to delete!

Managing reports

Creating reports lets you be as creative as you like with the various types of the reports available to make. When managing your reports, don’t ever delete a report – just archive it!

What happens when reports are archived?
When a report is archived, it hides it from view on the Reports>Overview page and deletes all email schedules. However, the report log history is retained and all previous emailed/exported files can be downloaded.

Why not delete a report?
When a report is deleted, you lose the entire report and it’s complete log history if it was scheduled for email or ever exported.

How to see archived reports
The Reports>Overview page has a filter option in the top right of the screen near the Period setting. Pressing filter will allow you to select the option to filter by text as well as show archived reports. Archived reports will have a blue archived icon.

Un-archiving reports
If a report has been archived and you would like to bring it back into use, make sure to use the filter option to see archived reports. Once viewable, you can press the blue archive button to have it be available on the Reports>Overview page.

Scheduling recent un-archived reports
When a report is un-archived, it will not have the previous email schedules from when ran in the past, new email schedules will need to be created for your current needs and recipients. Using the log can show who it was sent to in the past. Open the log and change the period to when the report was being used to see the log results.

Smart Bulk ordering

Have you implemented Smart Bulk settings?

Smart Bulk Supply ordering has been a great success! We are pleased with the feedback we are getting from users in the field.

Have you implemented Smart Bulk orders yet on your accounts?

Enabling the Smart Bulk algorithm?
You might ask, How do I start using the Smart Bulk ordering? It all comes down to the Location contact-type with a defined Address 1 field being assigned to devices.


If other contact types are assigned, but not the Location contact-type, then the standard bulk ordering algorithm will be used; ordering across the account regardless of the different company locations.

Quick way to assign contacts to devices
Getting contacts assigned to devices is simple! In Groups > Devices, you can select the preferred “Location” contact-type from the contacts drop-down then select the devices you want assigned to that contact, all at once!

Bulk ordering with intelligence

Contacts determine what gets ordered

Smart Bulk Supply ordering is enabled when using and assigning Contacts to devices to streamline ordering for different locations.

Many JetAdvice customers have multiple locations and a bulk order would order for all locations; London, Copenhagen, New York, etc… all in one order. When contacts with address information are assigned to devices, this helps identify a location for said devices to ensure the bulk orders are for that location specifically.

Bulk orders just got smarter!
It all comes down to the Contacts assigned to the one printer that triggered the alert. If that Contact has an address in field Address1, the address will be the criteria when smart bulk ordering is used. Otherwise, all supplies within the bulk settings will be alerted if no contact was set, like before regardless of where they are in the world.​

Now, only bulk supplies that share the same contact as the device that triggered the supply order will be ordered as per the bulk threshold settings. If devices that have supplies that meet the bulk settings but do not share the same contact with the same address information, those supplies will not be ordered at that event.

HP FutureSmart Color Counters

More color counters from HP

New devices means newer functionality. For a while now, HP has been releasing new ink devices that have more detailed color counter accountability.

With the new HP OfficeJet and PageWide printers hitting the market using more of the functionality from the FutureSmart firmware, there are more counters for accurate color usage. JetAdvice has been updated to include these newer fields to provide you, our customers, the opportunity to be able to get the most from these new printers.

The new accent and color counter fields to look out: General Office, Max DPI, Presentation and professional:

These new fields, for both print and copy functionalities, have already been made available in JetAdvice, we really wanted to make sure they were announced and available to use! That means 16 new fields to help account for accurate color usage, specifically on HP devices with FutureSmart firmware.

Check out www.hp.com for more information on these new counters!

Your ideas in JetAdvice!

Collaborate in our Idea Boards

At EuroForm, we strive to add value wherever we can in our family of JetAdvice products; Manager, Connect and Premium. Part of what makes JetAdvice products so great are the suggestions and contributions that come from our partners and customers.

Be Heard!
What would you like to see? Your ideas are important to the JetAdvice family, and JetAdvice users! Our idea boards for each JetAdvice product allow visitors to contribute ideas as well as upvote other’s contributions.

Adding and reviewing ideas
Before  pressing the “+ Give feedback” button at the top of a product page, take a look at the existing ideas. It is possible someone else has started a similar idea thread.

Click on any of the existing ideas to read more about the idea, add comments to other ideas and also upvote the idea. Upvoting can give a specific idea more weight and importance.

The EuroForm development team will continually be reviewing the ideas and focus on what is important to our users. Depending on complexity and importance development will be able to plan for implementing and releasing your ideas in future releases.

Product Idea boards:
JetAvice Manager
JetAdvice Connect
JetAdvice Premium

Dealer Dashboard Tip

Understanding the Customer Section of your Dealer Dashboard

On the Dealer Dashboard you have the ability to see all of the customers under your account in the section at the bottom titled Customers. Various information about the accounts is available, as well as the ability to set a status for each of them. You may utilize the filter to help see more information, or less, depending on filter criteria.


Customer:

This field provides the information for customer names and links to their accounts. If you feel some customers are missing, you might use the filter to “show archived” on the right incase any customer accounts are currently hidden.

Managed devices:

Number of current managed printers / max total number of printers for all time on the account.

New:

Number of managed printers added during the current period. For example, the period setting could be “Last 30 Days” showing new managed devices in the last 30 days.

Email alerts:

Alerts on the dashboards reflect more instant alerts detected and presented when communicated by the Data Collectors.

Last Collect:

Indicates the last time a Data Collector has performed a Collect phase. Note, there may be more than 1 Data Collector on  the account, some may be offline.

Status:

Although a list of various status options are provided, you are left up to your own discretion of how each status is used, based on your prefered note making.

Created: The customer account has only been created, may not indicate customer is notified yet by email.
DC Installed: A way to confirm the Data Collector has been installed. If no Scan Date is present it would help inform you, the Dealer, that support may be required to start the DC and/or find out of there are network issues.
Ranges Created: A status option to identify that ranges have been created for the customer. By default, there is only one range added from the installation; multiple ranges may be required depending on the environment.
Running: A general status of the account running with no issues.
Offline: A status to signify a note of the DC being offline, the Scan date may also show an older date indicating the DC has not been running and is a good reminder to check in with the customer.
Closed: Indicates the account is closed and does not require attention.
Temp Closed: This status option is a good way to display that the account is temporarily closed possibly to due to a stopped billing cycle and indicating account may be re-opened.
Call Customer: This status gives a good visual reminder to call the customer. One could use the Status Msg are to indicate who and/or why.
Send Technician: This status gives a good visual reminder to send a technician. One could use the Status Msg are to indicate why and when.
Escalation: This status option provides a clear status that there is an issue that requires your attention.
Assessment: Status message to indicate that this account is being used for assessment.
Production: Status indicates account is in production usage and requires little or no assistance.
Not Validated: Account has not been comfirmed and validated by the new customer.
Validated: Account has been confirmed and validated by the customer.

Status Message:

One would use the Status Message as an opportunity to elaborate, or only use the Status Message to communicate any notes regarding the account.

Archive:

If you choose to not want to see an account in your statistics or report data, pressing the archive icon will hide the account out of normal view. Checking the “Show Archived” in the filter to the upper right of this section, will show hidden customer accounts and allow you to change from “Archived” to “Unarchived”.

More informative information like this is available in the JetAdvice Manager FAQ section

New Toshiba counters available

New Toshiba counters available

Not every color page out of a printer is a full saturation print. In JetAdvice we aim to help our customers have a better picture of print usage from the fleets they manage.

The Toshiba counter set has recently been updated in JetAdvice Manager and now includes 4 Low Color counters for color Toshiba e-STUDIO devices.


These new fields are available under the Toshiba Advanced Counters section when creating and/or editing reports. Add the new Low Color counters to your reports to enhance the information to take action on!

Discovering devices and Community names

Discovering devices

JetAdvice is able to collect printer names, serial numbers, host names and other important information from devices, and it is the IP Address that is used as the primary key in JetAdvice for discovery; then matched to its MAC address because of the unique values.

How devices are discovered
Finding printers with the Data Collector in network environments is done by the unique IP address, as 2 networked devices can not successfully share an IP address. FAQ

Basic settings to be able to discover and collected devices

  • Devices must be turned on
  • Have SNMP v1 enabled at the device
  • Community name set as ‘public’ in the device’s network settings

How to use different Community names

If the policy is to not use the default name ‘Public’ for the community name, or one device is different than the others on a range; you can adapt the Data Collector range settings to use a specific Community name.

Modifying the community name can be done from the Data Collector in the JetAdvice portal by selecting Admin > Data Collectors and then click the name of a Data Collector to edit it’s range(s). Once saved, if other than ‘Public’ the community name will be displayed by the set IP range.

Define a range of IP addresses with one community name and another range of IP addresses with another community name if multiple community names are used across devices in a network range. FAQ

JetAdvice Server IP Change

Data Receiver Updated

The JetAdvice Data Receiver server has been updated, security / patch, which means DNS changes and a new IP address is in place.

The new IP: 52.166.79.7 on JetAdvice Data Receiver.

What does this mean for you and your customers?

Any customer who has set their firewall to allow communication to the IP of the JetAdvice server through a Firewall will not update after this change. Customers will need to update to the new IP address in their firewall settings.

Any customer who is using the direct URL “https://jadcws.jetadvice.com/v2/service1.svc” in their firewall settings, no changes are necessary.

If you see your Data Collector not being able to connect to the JetAdvice server, most likely you should look at the IP address. All FAQ’s and PDF documentation have been updated and are current.

Helpful documents:
FAQ: How to receive alerts for Offline Data Collectors
Video: Dashboard Alerts overview for seeing Offline Data Collectors

New A3 Counter and Report Filters

A3 Counters made easy

You might remember getting A3 printer counters was never as simple as seeing A4/letter counters. After lengthy research measures, we have produced an A3 printer counter options that makes it easy to use and properly account for A3 usage across vendors.

Each vendor shows large print sizes differently. We have been able to combine the various ways they are uniquely displayed, all into one counter. This new counter option works for all printers with A3 functionality that have the ability to communicate such information.

Filtering by Groups has returned to report views

You asked for it, we listened! Filtering by groups in a report view is now available!
When we moved to the new design and layout of JetAdvice in 2016, the filter in a Report view did not include the option to choose certain groups, since we built it into the report creation.

The group options are added back to the Filter allowing you to choose specific groups to add or ignore. This filter option is available in most report types and in other pages for your devices.

HP X Enterprise & PageWide Update

Wrong counters: Update your HP Universal Print Driver for proper page reporting

It has been brought to our attention that a few HP Enterprise X and PageWide models may be using incorrect counters when printing in greyscale and using older driver versions. Customer tests and results are showing prints done with the driver setting set to “greyscale” with older drivers are counting in the device as color prints. Even devices set with color disabled have been billed for color usage.

HP recommends using the latest 6.3 print driver for the HP OfficeJet Enterprise X555. X585 and HP PageWide MFP E58650 and similar series to ensure expected reporting of pages.

HP’s recent version 6.3 of the Universal Print Driver includes more functionality to select “Black ink only” when choosing “greyscale”.  To ensure black and white printing from HP UPD 6.3,  follow these steps to force true monochrome printing:

  • Select “Printer Properties” on the driver.

  • Select the “Color” tab

  • Unselect “HP EasyColor”

  • Select “Print in Grayscale”

Data Collector Error Message

“No more Data Collector slots”

The error message can happen when you try to register a new Data Collector when a Data Collector is already running on your account or has not been stopped/unregistered before you install/register another Data Collector on another computer.

Adding a Data Collector slot
Having multiple Data Collectors is perfectly fine to channel data to your account from different networks. If you need more Data Collectors available, add as many as you need for the desired installations.

As a dealer
Go to the Admin > Data Collectors section, for the account in question, and press the “Add Extra DC” button to allow another Data Collector to connect to the account.

As a customer
Contact your dealer to request adding another Data Collector slot to your account.

FAQ

Dimplex Counters & Maintenance Update

Dimplex: More HP counters available in JetAdvice

We are all familair with the terms Simplex and Duplex for printing. You might ask, “”Dimplex… What the?””

Dimplex is a way to account for jobs printed in duplex mode but the back side of the paper is blank. HP devices, depending on their version of firmware, will be able to utilize these counters in A4 and A3 sizes and can be separated by Mono and Color. Add these new fields to account for dimplex printed pages!

Maintenance update

We have updated how future maintenance is displayed in the JetAdvice portal. Now you will see red text identifying the next service window.

Updating the services and servers of JetAdvice is a nessecary requirement to maintain and improve our solution and we want to make sure all of our users are aware of any upcoming service windows.

Continual JetAdvice improvements: Indexing

Automating indexing for increased performance

Massive amounts of data come into JetAdvice Manager and to make sure that information is available to you, our customers, it gets indexed for faster reference. Indexing provides rapid lookups and efficient access of data for devices in your accounts.

This process of indexing data for quicker reference is not new to JetAdvice, but the automated process to do it more often is! For now, the indexing will run weekly and will provide increased performance for the user interface in JetAdvice Manager.

Contacts

Adding Contacts to your devices

Adding Contact information to devices provides a higher level of detail for those involved in meeting device needs. When Contacts are assigned to a device, those Contact fields can be used in created Report views and Emailed Reports.

Creating Contacts:
Adding the 5 different Contact types is done at the Admin > Contacts menu. Also linked at the Device Information page on the Inventory tab.

Assigning Contact to 1 device:
When pressing the device information link, Gray/Blue “i”, from a report allows access to the Inventory tab of the specific selected device. You will be able to select the specific Contacts for each different Contact option.

Assigning Contact to many devices:
To assign 1 Contact to many devices, this is done at the Groups > Group Devices menu option. Select the devices to assign to a specific Contact and then choose the Contact from the Contact drop down area and press Change Contact.

FAQ

Alternative Identifiers

Adding Alternative Identifiers to devices

With JetAdvice Manager, we know it is important that users get to identify their devices the way they need to. It is not always that you want to call a device by its name or it’s serial number, your organization may have it’s own device accounting system. we have 3 different alternative identifiers than can be used for reports in JetAdvice Manager.

How to add information to a Printer:
The Printer Details page can be accessed by pressing the gray/blue “”i”” icon next to a printer name from the dashboard or in a report. In the top section of the Printer Details there are 3 options for “”Alternative Identifiers”” section; Device ID, Serial# and Product#.

This information is used on top of the information gathered from your device. When any of these fields are filled in, the respective field categories can be added to any of the existing Views to ensure this new information can be part of the Views and Reports you look into.

How to add Alternative Identifiers to Views and Reports:
Open or create a Report to then edit the available columns. Add any, or all, of the Alternative Identifiers to your view by typing the name in the search area or choosing the information from the drop-down list for the desired fields you would like to add; changes are saved immediately.
FAQ

Easy Navigation

Easy navigation in JetAdvice Manager

In JetAdvice Manager we have made it easier to switch between customers, even when in reports to see the results instantly. See in the FAQ how you can reduce clicks to see different customer data!

JetAdvice Manager Video update!

We are working to add more content to our video support. We recently announced 3 new videos that are giving more information about the Dashoabrd alerts; how to use the alert section and manage alerts, get them in your email and also how to see the low supply alerts on the dashboard.

Dashboard Alerts – Overview
Dashboard Alerts – Subscribing to Alerts
Dashboard Alerts – HowTo See Low Supplies

If you feel you would like to see anything done in video that might help your customers or would be valuable to you, please communicate your ideas to us!

FutureSmart - Update Your Firmware

See if you have to update your firmware

Recently we have announced that we have updated all HP FutureSmart (FS) printers to use the FS counters, we can see more than 3000 devices in JetAdvice are not updating the mono and color counters. Devices are not updating because the firmware installed on the devices does not support the FS counter, something we mentioned may be a concern.

How to check your HP printers

To help find out if your devices are using supported firmware, we have created a view where you can see if you need to update the firmware or not. The report “FutureSmart counters status” includes Last Collect date and Counter date columns, if the 2 dates are the same it means you have the right firmware, if the Counter date is not the same as the Last Collected date, the firmware will need to be updated to support the FS counters which are the standard for these devices, used for mono and color counters.

HP Counters In JetAdvice Manager

Recently HP informed EuroForm that the FutureSmart (FS) devices should be using the FS Counters as the standard; replacing the standard page counters from HP that do not apply to FS devices.

JetAdvice Manager will be updating the devices that use FS Counters April 20st. We will expect to have transferred all FS Total counts on FS devices to show as the standard Total counts on April 21st.

The printers will first use the new counters when the JetAdvice data Collector has collected from the printer after the 21st. These counters will be reflected in the billing reports, there might be a slight difference from the change, but it will only be once that this change will affect billing concerns.

Please note:
Only some HP devices use FS counters, some of which require a firmware upgrade where newer devices come with FS as a standard. This will mean that if an FS device is not showing a count it will indicate that the device firmware will need to be upgraded.

Start using JetAdvice today

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