KPAX Liberty is not a Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi would require too much management effort to guarantee the security risks. The electronics and the firmware of the KPAX Liberty have been entirely developed by KPAX, which guarantees a reinforced security and a simplified management. To know more, you can download https://www.kpax-manage.com/downloads/ Best practice guide to collect your data in KPAX.
Yes, the Liberty box can be preconfigured in the workshop provided that the customer’s network information is available. When the box is received on site, the customer, who may be a non-technical person, only has to connect it. Of course, you only need one Liberty box per network, not one box per printing system 🙂
Yes, it is possible to read the information even when the machine is in standby mode as long as the network card is still active, which is the vast majority of cases.
Yes, there are notifications of collection agent or equipment inactivity.
KPAX is hosted by region, on Microsoft Azure servers. For more information, visit the Microsoft Azure website
We are able to retrieve information on all brands or models from SNMP or from the embedded web page (provided that the field to receive the data exists in KPAX). If some information of some models are badly or not returned, we have a permanent improvement procedure with an update every 6/8 weeks.
We have carefully considered the possibility of providing an answer, but it has to be said that the subject is very complex. Some solutions exist but the results are mixed and are very far from the level of a standard SNMP collection. To be compatible, USB printers must meet certain criteria such as being models whose declination exists in a network. This involves asking the customer to deploy an agent on all workstations and administer this agent. As a result, the information reported is of poor quality, the administration of the solution is more time-consuming and the satisfaction rate is very low. Until we have found a more reliable solution, we prefer not to do, rather than to hurt.
In order to collect the customer’s data to be sent back to the central cloud server, it is necessary to install at least one software collection agent or one hardware collection agent (Liberty box) somewhere on the network. If a customer does not want any data to be sent out (very secure customer such as bank, research, health, government), it is possible to install KPAX v2 in its on-premises version.
Consumable level notification settings apply per customer account. We are now working on the remaining time notification feature.
KPAX has a simple, powerful API and free of charge that allows the integration of the collected data with third party solutions such as billing software, ERP or CRM.
It is indeed possible to develop collection agents directly on the peripherals but the exercise is made difficult by the lack of homogeneity (multiple brands, multiple models, all ranges are not compatible) and by the lack of durability of the OEM platforms (regular updates must, indeed, be made to support OS changes of the equipment). To date, the KPAX publisher has decided to focus its efforts on the KPAX Liberty hardware agent, which is more perennial because it is independent of the customer’s hardware infrastructure.
First of all, it is very likely that with your existing solution you will have to intervene each year on at least 1/3 of your collection agents to reactivate them. Then, we tried to simplify the installation procedure of our agents. Remotely, the customer receives an email that guides them through the installation and it is even easier if they are accompanied online by a technician. On site, the technician only has to enter two pieces of information to activate the agent, which takes less than 10 minutes. Finally, our KPAX Liberty hardware agent can be pre-configured and sent by mail. Finally, some of our Major Valuable Partners offer support services for the deployment of new agents or for the maintenance in operational conditions.