Stuart,
I agree absolutely. Without an economic incentive, the there is little likelihood that many vendors will put in any effort to improve or even publicize their public MIB implementations. There must be a perception of customer demand for general manage-ability of a mixed fleet, products of multiple vendors managed by a single application.
Several years ago I expected the trend to third party fleet maintainers (e.g., Danka, Ikon, Pitney Bowles) to prompt such a demand; but these companies have been silent. More recently I would have expected the popularity of assay and hard-copy billing applications (many of which could sure stand access to job information from printers) to create a demand for consistent job mib implementation; but all I have seen are special deals with individual companies to use proprietary features.
Unless compliance with standard MIB (indeed, any management) implementations becomes readily identifiable and is demanded as a checkoff item on purchase requests, I suspect that there will be little motivation to include, update or improve implementations.
Bill Wagner
-------------- Original message --------------
From: "Stuart Rowley" <Stuart.Rowley at ktd-kyocera.com>
All,
Much of the discussion hinged around getting printer vendors to improve their implementations, to perform interoperability or certification, and to provide readily accessible information on the level of their implementations, etc. so that software applications can more successfully manage devices from multiple vendors.
As I think Harry mentioned, the original intent of the printer MIB effort was in large part to have third party vendors and the major enterprise management apps, such as Tivoli, Unicenter, and OpenView, develop robust printer management implementations. When this failed to materialize, virtually all printer vendors developed their own software to manage their devices and, to a lesser extent, competitors devices as well. (or maybe the printer vendors shot themselves in the foot by releasing these free printer management apps and killing the incentive for other development).
I think many printer vendors may be resigned to the fact that the majority of print device management will be done by their own management apps and they don’t have too much incentive to improve their partial management of competitors’ devices.
Thus, these vendors may have difficulty seeing the benefit of the effort involved to move forward with much of the work that was proposed during the discussion. Perhaps a listing of the benefits to the printer vendors would be necessary to spur interest. Until there is market pressure to improve poor SNMP/MIB implementations or a clearly defined tangible benefit, I think some printer vendors may not be willing to allocate resources to these efforts.
Regards,
Stuart
Stuart Rowley, Network Product Mgr.
stuart.rowley at ktd-kyocera.com 925 849-3306 925 849-3399 (fax)
Kyocera Technology Development Inc.
1855 Gateway Blvd. Suite 400
Concord, CA 94520
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