Noodlesoft Forums

Let me state my situation and what I'm trying to do and maybe some knowledgable Hazel users can tell me if Hazel is capable of helping me.

I work in a real estate office and my boss wants to offer our agents the ability to print from iOS and Android devices to our main office machine. Where the issue comes in is that we need to keep track of who prints what. This is easy enough if the agents print from their desktop computers because we have the printer software installed on them and when they print an accounting box pops up requiring them to type in their unique User ID's and passwords. But so far no method I've found for printing from phones and tablets lets me set an option for logging who printed what (number of prints, color or black and white, etc) or for interfacing with the accounting features of the printer.

So, finally to my question.

Can Hazel monitor a folder for new documents, print incoming new documents, log who they came from (name of the device that printed them, IP address, MAC address, something!), and then, just for convenience, delete the document after it printed?

Currently at the office we only have Windows machines so I would have to setup a mac with hazel on it. All the print server software I've tried on the windows machines have either been flaky, not worked with our printer or have not been able to interface with the accounting feature of our machine.

I would love some help with this.

Oh, and, if this helps at all, the office printer is an all in one machine. One of those giant ones from Canon. An Image Runner 5185, I believe. Yes, I've tried Canon's mobile apps (on iOS) with no luck and I've tried Google's cloud print but that won't log the information I need.

Hazel doesn't have a print action but you can have it use an Automator action to do that part. As far as the main point, identifying the owner of the files, it depends. I don't know how you are getting the documents from the phone to that folder so a lot depends on that. You would need to check the attributes on that file and see if there is anything there you can use to identify people. Ultimately, though, I think most of this depends on the software linking the phones to that folder.

Thanks Mr Noodle for your reply. I'm not sure I'll be able to do what needs to be done. At least not with Hazel. I'll have to look Into other options.

Thanks again