Has anyone found a free,(as in beer), meter read software? Nothing too fancy, just something that fetches them and sends an email. I know this big business now, but surely there must be an open source solution???

With machines with print capability we just set command center up to automatically email us the counter report on the 28th of each month (it's not intelligent so if a month doesn't have the day you specified it won't send it.)

If if is just 1 or 2, ok, but how about a 15 machine factory. Mix of T/A, printers,(black and white and color).I was just gonna have the client use km net viewer, and email a screen shot of the meter page, but I'm looking for something a bit more professional, if you catch my drift.

We started using a company called PrintMIB to do our meter reads, its not free, costs I think like 25 cents per customer, not per machine. Don't quote me on that but I know its something like that. Its very simple to setup and use, you can monitor all machines within a specifed IP add. and turn off the ones you don't want to monitor, working great for us, most of the time we can call the customer and walk them thru the download, the software doesn't allow you access to anything but the machine information. Check it out, the guys that run this place will do a meeting with you via phone conf. and show you everything.

I am aware of these off site companies that charge 20-25 cents per machine, I am looking for open source,(FREE).

My company developed software to handle the meter collections. It has since spun-off as its own company. It's not free, but check it out. www.labradorsolutions.com

quote:

Originally posted by drewsup:
I was just gonna have the client use km net viewer, and email a screen shot of the meter page, but I'm looking for something a bit more professional, if you catch my drift.

KM-Net viewer will allow you to export a report as CSV or XML files. Just select FILE > EXPORT > DEVICES. You get the full report that you can then read in a spreadsheet. I have one customer doing this at a location with 40+ devices (mostly HP LaserJets, but they report in KM-Net Viewer fine) and the Labrador Solutions client cannot talk past the site's ironclad firewall no matter what was tried.

Otherwise, the Labrador Solutions as previously mentioned works OK, requires .Net framework for whatever computer it is running on (this has been an issue at some locations, such as one customer still running Windows 2000 on an ancient PC). It reports most Kyocera products good, Konica-Minolta machines with Fiery not so good, and some others. Doesn't play that well with some anti-virus applications (considered spyware by these products), and the scheduled device scan causes problems at other places (can be turned off now in the more current releases).