Classification:
Prologue:
Epilogue: Roger K deBry
Senior Techncial Staff Member
Architecture and Technology
IBM Printing Systems
email: rdebry at us.ibm.com
phone: 1-303-924-4080
For your information ...
---------------------- Forwarded by Roger K Debry/Boulder/IBM on 04/22/97 09:46
AM ---------------------------
Printing Information Via the 'Net Goes Standard
By SHARON FISHER
An industry group is defining protocols to give users standard access to
printing resources using the Internet.
When the protocols are defined later this year, and implemented, users
will be able to find out about a printer's capabilities, submit jobs to a
printer, find out the status of a printer or print job and cancel a submitted
job,
according to the group, which met earlier this month at the Internet
Engineering Task
Force meeting in Memphis, Tenn.
With products supporting such a specification, intranet users could use a
standard browser to see what printers are available, said Don Wright,
manager of strategic alliances for Lexmark International Inc., Lexington,
Ky.,and chairman of the Printer Working Group, which initially supervised the
standardization effort. And from an Internet perspective, organizations
could replace fax machines with Internet-based printers, saving on long
distance charges, he said. In addition, services such as Kinko's could set up
printers to let users send print jobs to remote locations, or to offer printing
services to users on the road, he said.
Such a specification would probably be most useful for organizations with
a number of remote sites, said William Tiller, IS manager for the city of
Encinitas, Calif. "If the thought process was to use the Internet as a
carrier for remote locations instead of dialing in over the telephone with a
modem
pool, that would be a good solution," he said. But he doesn't think the city,
with six remote locations, would be likely to use the technology because of the
added overhead the Internet would require. "We're not that big," he said. "We
would have to put up firewalls and routers at every location," and it wouldn't
be cost-effective for him, he said.
Vendors will probably be demonstrating products with the technology this
year, and the first products supporting the technology might even ship
this year, Wright said. Some 20 vendors are taking part in the group,
including Wright's Lexmark, which recently announced a Java-based printer
management application. "This is perfectly in line with that kind of
effort," he said.
The effort combines the Lightweight Document Printing Application
specification, which Novell was working on last fall, with a similar
project by IBM called HyperText Printing Protocol that ran over the web. Since
then,
vendors such as Adobe Systems Inc., Microsoft, Netscape Communications
Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. have gotten involved, said Scott Isaacson,
Novell's print services architect and editor of the specification.
The combination of multiple efforts makes this "pretty much a done deal,"
said Jon Oltsik, senior analyst with Forrester Research Inc., a Cambridge, Mass
., consultancy.
The IPP working group can be reached at www.pwg.org/ipp/