Depending on the organization, a department might be interested in using the account tracking feature of certain copiers. This would allow an organization to track and calculate a bill per PIN Code. This could allow an individual or a department to be billed individual for their printing at the end of the billing cycle.
Beyond the business need, for a lot of people the PINs are just a real pain. The Konica Minolta copiers that I’m familiar with behave interesting with account tracking enabled. If one person or department wants to use Account Tracking, all printing to it and making copies have to use PIN codes. If you send a print job without an Account Track password added, the computer thinks the job went successfully but the printer simply deletes the job. There is no indication that your print out will not be waiting for you when you visit the copier.
For the Mac OS X side of the house, the process is rather convoluted but I’ve documented it before. The manual way to add the password on Windows is go into Printer properties. If you set it through Preferences the code should be remembered for that user. If you set it through Printing Defaults, that should be remembered across all users on that computer.
To automate it a little bit more and circumvent some problems that arose with mandatory profiles, I used Group Policy Preferences to update the PIN Code through the registry. The path is:
HKCUSoftwareKONICA MINOLTAKONICA MINOLTA 42SeriesPCL6KM 36 Rm 1011AccountTrack
More generically, the path is:
HKCUSoftwareKONICA MINOLTA[Driver name][Printer name]AccountTrack
Under that key, create a value to these conditions:
Value name: DepartmentPass
Type: Reg_Binary
Value data: binary representation of your account track password
The binary representation is not as simple as entering your password there. I would recommend copying the value from a computer that has translated and verified the password. You can also set the DepartmentName value or just leave it blank.
With Group Policy Preferences, you can use Item Level Targeting to assign this key so it only goes to specific users or computers. Depending on your account tracking use, this should give enough flexibility to automate distributing the PINs. The biggest requirement will be that the printers name be consistent.