An Introduction to iPrint

Test Objective Covered:

1. Identify the benefits of iPrint.

Consider the following scenario: You are leading a project team for your company. In the morning, you have a meeting with executive management where you will be required to present a Product Requirements Document (PRD) for the new product your team is designing.

You're home for the evening when you receive a panicked phone call from one of your key team members indicating there is a glaring problem with the product design. Fortunately, she has found a solution to the problem and has uploaded some new specs to your team's shared NetStorage folder.

You fire up your home computer and download the specs. You realize that the changes will require a dramatic revision to the PRD, which is already nearly 100 pages long. It's going to be a very long night. Using iFolder, you access your PRD file from your home PC and start typing.

At 2:00 in the morning, you finally finish making the changes to the document. Unfortunately, you still have a problem. Being an organized project manager, you arranged to have 10 copies of the PRD printed and inserted in binders early yesterday . Now those 1,000 pages are completely outdated and are headed for the recycle bin.

You need to print out fresh copies of the PRD before your 9:00 a.m. meeting with management. Your inkjet printer at home isn't up to printing a 1,000 page run, nor is it capable of the quality required for a management presentation. You need access to the color laser printer at the office, which is capable of printing full- color documents at four pages per minute. At that rate, it's going to take over four hours to print all 10 copies.

To make your meeting, you need to start printing immediately. That will leave you enough time to get the pages punched and inserted in the binders.

Under typical circumstances, you would need to drive into the office and start the print job running, wasting a considerable amount of time that could be spent getting some rest before your big presentation. I can tell you from personal experience that there are few experiences more unpleasant than trying to coherently make an important presentation when you haven't had any sleep the night before.

If, however, your organization has implemented the iPrint component of NNLS, printing this document becomes a non-issue. iPrint uses the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) to provide printer access over the Internet.

If you have experience managing Linux systems, you know that the CUPS and LPRNG services are available and also provide IPP support. The value of iPrint over these solutions, however, is the ease of use it provides for the user .

With iPrint, a user can open a web browser and access the iPrint web page on an NNLS server. In this web page, the user can locate and select the printer he or she wants to print to in a graphical floor plan. All the software required to allow his or her Windows workstation to print to the printer using IPP is downloaded and installed, including the correct print driver.

If you've ever supported users in a help desk role, you know how critical this functionality is. I can't tell you how many times I've seen users send print jobs using the wrong print driver because they didn't know how to correctly set up a printer in Windows. The result is usually 500 wasted pages of PostScript code. iPrint prevents this problem by automatically configuring the printer at the workstation with the correct IPP URL and driver.

Using iPrint, employees can print to your organization's printers from anywhere they have an Internet connection and a web browser. This can be a boon for mobile employees in large organizations. They can configure their workstations to send print jobs to printers in the local office where they are currently working without help desk assistance.

Many new to NNLS get nervous at this point. They're concerned that individuals outside the company might discover the URL to the iPrint web page and be able to wreak havoc with their printers. Never fear! iPrint is fully integrated with eDirectory and, therefore, access to iPrint printers is controlled by eDirectory rights. Those trying to access the printers without an eDirectory user account will not be able to do so.

In addition, you can use eDirectory rights to restrict access within your organization. For example, suppose you have a high-quality color laser printer that is very expensive to operate . You can restrict access to the printer to a specific group of eDirectory users who specifically need it to print presentations, brochures , or other collateral that needs high-quality color printing. Employees who don't need it aren't allowed access to it.

Another important benefit of iPrint is the fact that it is managed using iManager. This gives you a single point of management for all your printers. Because iManager is web based, it also provides you with remote printer management capabilities. This is of great value when you get a support call in the middle of the night. Instead of driving all the way in to work to fix a minor problem, you can boot up your home PC, access iManager, and fix the problem without changing out of your pajamas.

With this introduction in mind, let's discuss how iPrint works.