[IPP] RFC: Definitions of Workgroup, Enterprise, and Production Printers

[IPP] RFC: Definitions of Workgroup, Enterprise, and Production Printers

Michael Sweet msweet at msweet.org
Tue Jan 18 20:18:48 UTC 2022


Smith,

> On Jan 18, 2022, at 12:13 PM, Kennedy, Smith (Wireless & IPP Standards) <smith.kennedy at hp.com> wrote:
> 
> Thanks for this Mike!
> 
> I was reading these and one thing that occurred to me is that the Enterprise Printer category is mostly about features supporting a larger volume of users, although finishing is certainly an exception to this. The Production Printer, by contrast, is more about even more sophisticated features and more granular control of those features, and while still having a need for more Job Accounting is usually not supporting access to a large number of users, Print Policies or Release Printing. Does that seem correct?

Yes, the focus on production is on the customer, not individual users.  So the accounting stuff is explicitly for billing vs. cost tracking/management in the enterprise (which gets tied to users/orgs/projects).

> I also wanted to point out that a "Cloud Workgroup Printer" adds in some of the AAA requirements of Enterprise printer, which drives some of those Enterprise class features into smaller units. Does that seem reasonable? Should we be adding that to the taxonomy as a separate category or as a mix-in?

CUPS has been providing "enterprise" and "light production" functionality to $50 inkjet printers for over 20 years! :)  That doesn't mean that we should call every $50 printer a "Cloud Workgroup Printer", or that we can test such as printer for conformance to such a category - we can only test CUPS' conformance, right?

STD 92 already covers fan-out to output devices and the notion that the IPP Printer object provides a high-level interface to them.  Any managed/cloud print service that talks to a Workgroup Printer is doing fan-out, and if that print service conforms to EPX then it (the print service) is an Enterprise Printer, not the Workgroup Printer it talks to.

________________________
Michael Sweet



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