iPrint lets mobile employees, business partners, and customers access printers from a variety of remote locations using existing Internet connections. Whether users are located in an office building, telecommuting from home, or attending a sales meeting in another country, iPrint ensures that they can print documents quickly, easily, and reliably.
Using a Web browser, users point to a Web page that displays the available printers. By clicking a printer, the iPrint client is installed (if not installed previously), the printer's driver is downloaded, and a printer is created in the user's Printer folder, enabling the user to send documents to the printer from any application on the desktop.
iPrint is comprised of the following components:
Broker: Handles the Resource Management Service that is a database of print drivers. When a user installs a printer, the print driver is automatically downloaded to the user's workstation and installed.
Print Manager: Holds information about each printer and manages the communication between workstations and printers.
Printers: Represented as Printer objects in eDirectoryTM and as printer agents in the print manager. The printer agent holds the information you specify about the printer (printer name, location, description, etc.), which helps users know which printer they should print to.
iPrint Client: Required by the user workstation to communicate with the print manager. The iPrint client is a set of browser plug-ins that lets users find and install printers using their Web browsers.
iPrint Printer List: An auto-generated Web page that lists the printers that have been created. From this list you can install printers and view printer information including print job information.
iPrint Map Designer: A tool that lets you use a background image of your office layout to create an interactive Web page that your users can install printers from.
The print broker, print manager, and all Printer objects are created in the same e-Directory parent container as the Server object. The name of the broker is PrintBroker and the name of the manager is PrintManager. The manager and broker are automatically created the first time you add a printer.
WARNING: If you change the name of the print manager or broker, the Small Business Setup assumes it doesn't exist and creates a new one with the name above.