Welcome to Pluraprint

Pluraprint manages a fleet of 3D printers and the print jobs that run on them. A deployment can cover one lab or several buildings, campuses, and sites.

This guide is written for the people who use Pluraprint day-to-day: administrators who set up printers and policies, staff who review and approve jobs, and members who submit prints. If you’re looking for source code or system internals, you’re in the wrong place. This is the “how do I…” guide for the product itself.

How Pluraprint is organized#

A few ideas show up everywhere in Pluraprint. Understanding them up front makes everything else much easier to follow.

• Sites are your physical locations: a lab, a library, a building. Printers, agents, approval rules, usage limits, and walk-up kiosks all belong to a site.
• Agents are small pieces of software that run at each site and connect your physical printers to Pluraprint over the internet.
• Printers are the 3D printers themselves: real hardware like Bambu Lab and Formlabs printers, or test printers used for training and demos.
• Print jobs are individual print requests. A job moves through a lifecycle: submitted, reviewed, approved, queued, printed, and completed (or rejected/cancelled along the way).
• Rules describe what has to happen before a job is allowed to print, for example, “every job needs an owner” or “jobs over 8 hours need a lab manager’s approval.”
• Quotas put limits on usage, for example, “each student can use 500g of filament per month.”
• Roles & permissions control who can do what: who can approve jobs, manage printers, invite teammates, and so on.
• Stations are walk-up kiosks (tablets or touchscreens) where people can identify themselves and prepare a print job without using the full web app.

Who does what#

Role (typical)	What they do
Administrator	Sets up sites, agents, printers, materials, rules, quotas, roles, and team members.
Staff / Operator	Reviews and approves jobs, manages printers day-to-day, resolves errors.
Member	Submits print jobs and tracks their own queue.
Walk-in / Guest	Uses a Station kiosk to identify themselves and prepare a print, with no account required.

Your organization may use different names for these roles: Pluraprint ships with a starter set of roles, but administrators can create their own (see Roles & Permissions).

What Pluraprint sets up for you#

Pluraprint is offered as a managed service. When your organization signs up, our team handles the initial deployment of your environment and creates your first administrator account and site(s). A few other things, such as connecting your organization’s single sign-on (SSO) provider, are configured together with our team rather than entirely self-service. Wherever that’s the case, this guide calls it out explicitly.

Everything else, including adding printers, inviting your team, writing approval rules, setting quotas, and running day-to-day operations, is self-service from the web dashboard.

Where to go next#

• New to Pluraprint? Start with Key Concepts for a closer look at the building blocks above.
• Setting up a brand-new deployment? Follow the Setup Checklist for a recommended order of operations.
• Just need to submit a print? Jump straight to Submitting a Print Job.