Body
Overview
Identify triage that USS technicians should perform when problems are reported with the Pay-to-Print (Computer Lab) print service. The two goals for this document are to help solve common problems for print users quickly, and to make sure that a transition from Tier 1 or Tier 2 support to Tier 3 support is smooth.
Required triage data
There are many variables at play when troubleshooting public printing issues. We cannot identify and document everything that can go wrong, so the more data we have, the better.
Escalating an incident to EDM-Labs
Please provide the following data as best as possible:
Who
- Identify who is being affected by issue
- Duck ID is always helpful
- Are multiple people being affected?
What
- Describe issue with as much detail as possible
- Attempt to reproduce the error
- Identify the scope
- Verify if it is affecting multiple computers, an entire area, or seems to be campus-wide
- If software on a lab computer appears to be the issue, does changing software (application, OS, or a major printer setting) help?
- List what has been attempted during triage
Where
- Indicate physical location of where the issue is occurring, and which printer is seeing the issue.
- Example: "We were trying to print from UO-XXXXXX (PC) to printer (insert printer name)."
When
- If user has a very big print log, please include timestamps of when the issue occurred and how much user was charged for the print job.
- Example: "The user had this occur around 9:30 a.m. and was charged $1.20. Confirmed this in the PaperCut Web Admin Console."
Best practices
Please clearly identify the issue that is occurring with as much detail as possible. Below you can see an example that you should avoid sending to EDM-Labs and an example of what we would prefer to receive with escalation requests.
Avoid:
- Example: "Student can't print in computer lab"
- Reasoning: What is student's Duck ID? What type of file are they trying to print (.doc, .pdf, .xls, etc...) ? What computer lab? What computer were they using when issues occurred? Mac or PC? Which printer were they attempting to print to? What kind of work was done already? Submitting this information in the initial contact will provide more efficient service for you and your customers.
Suggested:
- Example: "Student is not able print in EMU Computer Lab (Duck ID: bheiken). Student is using UO-XXXXXX (Mac). We have tried to release the print job on both printers in the EMU lab area. Students are trying to print a PDF file that is saved in their personal Google Drive with Google Chrome. We tried to print the same PDF file with a different browser and saw the same results. Tech then tried to replicate the issue with a different PDF file and was not able to reproduce the issue. Print jobs are showing up as expected. Checked the user's PaperCut printing logs and verified that jobs are showing as released in PaperCut, the students accounts are being charged as the job was actually printed, yet not print job shows up."
- Reasoning: Identifies who this is happening to, identifies which computer student was using, identifies which printers jobs were released to, identifies what type of document was trying to be printed, and identifies where the document lives. Then lists steps actually done to confirm the behavior and finds that scope of issue is limited to the student's file. Also verifies that tech went into the PaperCut Web Admin Console and looked at logs to verify/confirm behavior.