Your Flexible Print Environment

With the demand for reliable, cost-effective, and easy-to-maintain print environments on the rise, it is more important than ever to properly identify what your organization needs.

Some important questions when evaluating your needs include:

• Do I need my print server to have a central control point for all my organization’s printing?

• Do I want to stop using the dedicated Windows print servers currently in use to share printing across my organization (due to technical issues, maintenance overhead, and other reasons)?

• Can I afford to spool print jobs to a centralized location, for example, due to network throughput, or do I prefer direct IP printing to devices because my organization needs to keep all documents within the premises of the local branch?

• Do I want a tool that collects statistics for me while keeping my current dedicated print server environment intact, with no changes required to get oversight over print in my organization?

• Do I need to perform advanced operations on the documents users in my organization print, pausing them, modifying them, enforcing eco policies, adding security watermarks, etc.?

MyQ X offers solutions for every one of these scenarios.

 

Server Spooling

If you deploy a MyQ X-operated print server in your organization, you will unlock the broad collection of features MyQ X offers. We described all these features on the upcoming pages of this Overview guide and in the rest of our Online Documentation.

In this scenario, documents your users send to print are transmitted from the source computer to the MyQ X Print Server. The job is processed, authenticated (associated with the job sender), analyzed for print properties set by the print driver, policies set by the administrators are applied, and the job is marked as ready for release.

Release conditions depend on the type of print queue the job has been sent to – Direct queue, Pull Print queue, Tandem queue, or Delegated queue.

When to use server spooling

• You want to manage your environment centrally and have control over all the devices, users, cost accounting, etc.

• You have multiple locations or sites servicing a considerable number of users and devices.

• You need or want to monitor and potentially apply policies in your print environment, encourage sustainable behavior, offer users reports about their own printing, or you need a system to charge users for printing.

• You do not want to manually manage deployment, for example installing and configuring the print drivers, and you prefer having your print management system manage itself automatically.

• You are working with confidential documents, and you know that you need secure hold print or pull print in your organization, to secure documents with watermarks, etc.

• Your organization has complex needs and requires solutions that are only feasible using a print server.

Drawbacks of server spooling

• Additional software and tools that require manual updates and maintenance.

• An increase in the requirements on your network stability and speeds, and without failover measures, the creation a single point of failure.

When using MyQ, some of these limitations can be solved by adding the Desktop Client and Embedded Terminals to your system, as they supply features for offline operation, fallback printing, and spooling alternatives.

Printing to MyQ X 101

1. Set up the Queues in MyQ, configure required settings, and assign printers and users.

2. Experiment with the other MyQ settings to achieve exactly the print environment you want.

3. Install printers on your client computers with ports directed to the MyQ Print Server.

Users print to the server where jobs are processed and accounted for, allowing for full control over your print environment. The conditions of how and when the job is released depend on the queue type the job was sent to.

Direct (IP) Spooling

Print jobs are sent from the user’s computer, laptop, or smartphone to the printer, omitting the print server. To oversee such jobs, apply policies, and include them in reporting, some form of monitoring has to be introduced.

With MyQ X, monitoring can be supplied by:

• Reporting of statistics by the MyQ Embedded Terminal after a direct print is performed.

• The counter checker on the Print Server, thanks to which prints outside of MyQ can be detected and included in reporting, even without an Embedded Terminal.

• The monitoring and accounting capability of the MyQ Desktop Client is installed on the computer a user is sending a job from.

When to use direct printing

• If your connection might not be reliable enough to send print jobs to a centralized location. With direct IP printing, only one user, not the entire organization, is affected by a driver problem or a job stuck in the queue.

• You manage a print environment that consists of a small number of printing devices, and installing a local print server for each would be excessive.

• Your organization needs to keep all data of printed documents inside of your local office network.

Drawbacks of direct printing

• The need for manual management of print drivers on user workstations, and manual configuration is higher with direct printing.

With MyQ X, print driver management can be resolved with automatic printer provisioning with the MyQ Desktop Client in the client spooling mode; this combines the positives of central print driver deployment and direct IP printing.

Direct printing with Client Spooling

You can use MyQ Desktop Client (MDC) and its monitoring and accounting capabilities to get all the benefits of sending jobs to a print server, without actually doing so. With Client Spooling set up, MDC collects metadata about the job that is being sent to a device and reports it to the MyQ Print Server.

How to print client-spooled jobs

1. Set up Queues in MyQ, configure required settings, and assign printers and users.

2. Deploy the MyQ Desktop Client on computers with the Client Spooling feature enabled and connect the client to the MyQ Print Server.

3. Configure printers on client computers according to Client Spooling – ports will be set to localhost and the queue previously configured in MyQ.

Users can now print using the configured printer that sends jobs locally to MyQ Desktop Client which will do the rest – send the job metadata to the print server and the document itself to the printer.

Direct print bypassing MyQ

Direct print can still be a viable option for smaller organizations, or it can be used in your environment to fulfill specific needs. Direct printing can still be monitored to some degree.

Activated printers in MyQ have their page counters checked regularly. Jobs printed on these machines outside of a user session (without prior authentication) are detected and reflected in reporting and accounted under *unauthenticated user.