Preton Saver - Creating an application policy for a non-printing application

Preton Saver is a companion product to Pharos Blueprint Enterprise that further optimizes printing costs by reducing the amount of ink or toner applied to the page. As part of its operation it injects a monitoring function into launched applications to see if they do any printing; if the application prints then it is added to a list so that toner savings outside of those available to the toner policy may or may not be applied. One of the potential byproducts of injecting into an application, however, is instability within the application to the point where some function may no longer work or, in the worst case, the application crashes. In many cases, the applications that become unstable don't even print. This document discusses how to manage a non-printing application to protect it from injection.

The Basics

As mentioned in the introduction, nearly all applications on a workstation are injected for monitoring by the local Preton Saver client. The three possible states of an application within Preton Saver are:

• Monitor. The application is injected and monitored for print, but special toner savings are not applied. However, if the logged-in user has an applicable toner savings policy, those savings are applied.

• Save. The application is injected for print, and special toner savings are applied. For example: a general toner savings policy is applied for 35% savings, but if the application is Mozilla Firefox, savings of 50% are applied. Conversely, an application savings policy may specify lower savings; for example Adobe Photoshop CS may only be set for 10% savings.

• Protect. The application is not injected by Preton Saver, and no toner savings are applied for print jobs that come from that application.

The following set of steps will result in a protected application because it is known that the application has no way to print a job.

Creating The Application Within Preton Saver

In general, the only time an application "bubbles up" through Preton Saver for management is if that application is actually involved in printing a job. The steps below create an entry within Preton Saver when no print jobs exist for the application.

1. Install and launch Pretol Control. It is recommended that this be installed on the server hosting Preton Coordinator.

2. Once connected to the Preton Coordinator instance, click the Applications group.  

   

3. Select any one of the applications in the list.

4. In the "Applications Settings" panel on the right, click the "Add Filter" button. It will be near the middle of the page in the "Document Association" group.  

   

5. In the "Filter Text" field, type the friendly name of the application. To create a filter for the RealVNC Viewer, type RealVNC Viewer.

    

   

   NOTE: Do not use a Regular Expression; keep that option unchecked.

6. Under "Application Association" choose to associate a new application and type the application name shown in Windows Explorer without the "exe" extension.  

   

7. Click the "OK" button when done.

8. Click the "Apply" button in the top toolbar.

    

   

9. Locate the new application in the list (the text color will be black) and select it.

10. In the "Application Settings" page, click the "Application setting" option and change it from "Monitor" to "Protect."  

    

11. Apply the change by clicking the "Apply" button in the top toolbar. The application name will change to an orange fill.

At this point, either exit the Preton Control application or add any other applications that you wish to protect.

Managing the Change at the Client

In most environments, the Preton Saver client installed on the Windows workstation/laptop is configured to contact the Preton Coordinator software infrequently for policy updates. To force a policy update, follow this process:

1. Exit the application that needs protection if it is running.

2. Browse to C:\Program Files\Preton\PretonSaver.

3. Launch PretonTraceView.exe (it does not require launching as an administrator).

4. Locate the "Update Policy" button in the upper-right corner of the window and click it.

    

   

5. Exit Preton Trace View.