ECI Software Solutions offers printer management software for managed print service (MPS) providers. Their Printanista remote device monitoring technology collects critical printing data from an unlimited number of devices.
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MySQL
Score 7.8 out of 10
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MySQL is a popular open-source relational and embedded database, now owned by Oracle.
We only use it to track meters and ink levels. But it's well suited for that as that is the most important thing to track, and the website does it well. As far as when it's less appropriate, I'm not sure, as we use it only when it's needed, and it does its job.
MySQL is best suited for applications on platform like high-traffic content-driven websites, small-scale web apps, data warehouses which regards light analytical workloads. However its less suited for areas like enterprise data warehouse, OLAP cubes, large-scale reporting, applications requiring flexible or semi-structured data like event logging systems, product configurations, dynamic forms.
It allows me to gather and organize meter data in relevant and useful ways. It works very well with MS Excel spreadsheets.
It provides complete meter data so that you can provide your Sales dept. with enough useful information so that eventual upgrade proposals can be constructed. It also provides real information that tells how much print volume may or may not have to suggest changes to a customer fleet of printers.
It is also simple enough for customers with smaller printer fleets so that you can isolate certain areas of the meter data that may prove useful in certain applications.
The helpdesk and support is useless. I literally know more about the product than they do.
The onsites and connection to central is unreliable. We have to hire an extra employee just to keep this running.
The programers don't think about or test the patches the push out. Onistes break after they update central
Some machines will show up in the MIB walk but wont actually show up on the device page. Thier solution is to create a new account. They don't have the technical capacity to figure out why it is doing this.
Just a very unreliable product that we have multiple tickets a week open that they seem to never be able to resolve
Learning curve: is big. Newbies will face problems in understanding the platform initially. However, with plenty of online resources, one can easily find solutions to problems and learn on the go.
Backup and restore: MySQL is not very seamless. Although the data is never ruptured or missed, the process involved is not very much user-friendly. Maybe, a new command-line interface for only the backup-restore functionality shall be set up again to make this very important step much easier to perform and maintain.
For teaching Databases and SQL, I would definitely continue to use MySQL. It provides a good, solid foundation to learn about databases. Also to learn about the SQL language and how it works with the creation, insertion, deletion, updating, and manipulation of data, tables, and databases. This SQL language is a foundation and can be used to learn many other database related concepts.
I give MySQL a 9/10 overall because I really like it but I feel like there are a lot of tech people who would hate it if I gave it a 10/10. I've never had any problems with it or reached any of its limitations but I know a few people who have so I can't give it a 10/10 based on those complaints.
We have never contacted MySQL enterprise support team for any issues related to MySQL. This is because we have been using primarily the MySQL Server community edition and have been using the MySQL support forums for any questions and practical guidance that we needed before and during the technical implementations. Overall, the support community has been very helpful and allowed us to make the most out of the community edition.
Printanista doesn't do much differently from other products in the same class. They are all relatively easy to deploy and monitor print levels. Most of the time, the printer readings are accurate and allow you to make sure a customer's print environment is running smoothly. Printanista works about the same amount of time as a Printix application.
MongoDB has a dynamic schema for how data is stored in 'documents' whereas MySQL is more structured with tables, columns, and rows. MongoDB was built for high availability whereas MySQL can be a challenge when it comes to replication of the data and making everything redundant in the event of a DR or outage.
The interface is fairly easy to navigate and figure things out.
It could use improvement for some Xerox devices, as it lists some models as " . " instead of the model name.
This has saved us tens of thousands per year instead of sending techs to collect meters.
The latest version of this product allows you to access the interface of the device, from the cloud dashboard instead of having to remote on to a user's workstation and then get to the device. This is cutting-edge technology without a doubt.
