Novell NetWare® 6:
printing meets the Internet

People throughout history have struggled to leave their marks on the world, or at least their jobs. The urge to write down information pushed cavemen to draw historical and descriptive scenes on cave walls. A similar urge pushes white collar workers to illustrate simple memos with multiple fonts then print copies for each and every person in their department. This urge isn't nearly as artistic, but it may have actually gotten stronger over the past 35,000 years.

For something as critical to computer users as printing, one would think it would get easier and more reliable over the years. Unfortunately, more ways to make marks on paper seem to multiply the complexity rather than simplify the printing process.

Network printing, at least in the early days, did work more simply than today. Once the HP LaserJet printers became available, networks grew to support these expensive yet near mandatory printer. On every network sat a LaserJet. Network printing meant sending a print job to that LaserJet.

Today, network printing forces users through an amazingly complex set of operations, magnified by the options for users on networks today. Printers directly attached to the network, or to network print servers, can be anywhere in the company
yet remain under the control of the network. Just because a printer may be close to a user means nothing about the capability for the user to send a print job to that printer. A user's default printer may not be anywhere that person physically.

One alliterative slogan, Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance, has been topped by the heading of this section: Printing Problems Pummel Productivity. Prior planning long ago failed to control the confusing mix of printer drivers, printer location, user authentication for certain printers, and the ever-aggravating search for missing pieces in the chain leading from an application's Print button to a finished page
filled with the proper information.

Users LOVE Printing

One of the great promises from early computer pioneers, "the paperless office," long ago became a joke. Printer sales remain up. Paper use remains up. People love to print, they love to make a few changes and print again, then repeat the cycle endlessly.

Why do users love to print so much? Could be a psychological mistrust of computer. For those people, information isn't real unless that information exists on paper. Seeing a form on screen isn't enough for many people because they want to see the information on paper so they can write in the margins and read the paper with less eyestrain than they read it on the screen.

A quick random sample of large corporate Novell® NetWare® customers got these comments:
"If a person wants a printer, they get a printer." Another: "It seems like every user has three printers."

If your budget dwindles in the "printer supplies" line item, you have too many printers. Because printers aren't organized, people who should share a printer often have their own printers. "This is my color printer. Go get your own." Actually, it's the company's color printer, but users get extremely territorial about printers.

Continual User Frustration

Part of the problem many users have sharing printers comes from their frustration with printers. Different printers need different drivers, a concept many users pretend to not understand because they try to avoid the hassle. If their Windows* client system has been updated with drivers for the printers they want to use, they don't want to change. Even if the Windows printer setup wizard includes the correct drivers, users avoid the process whenever possible.

Accessing network printers through NetWare traditionally required Client32 software. Normally highly reliable and unobtrusive, even Client32 can't give users a magic wand to fix their printing problems. So although Client32 doesn't exaggerate printing problems, users who don't use many network resources beyond printing don't appreciate the added steps now necessary for them to access printers.

Being essentially invisible, formatting within documents that changes based on the printer driver used greatly aggravates users. A document that looked wonderful when printed from their color Xerox printer looks horrible when printed through their high resolution HP LaserJet. Even if the user remembers they created the document with the Xerox as their default printer (which they probably won't), explaining the differences between printer drivers to users never satisfies the techs or the users.

High Rate of Service Calls

Frustrated users almost immediately start the support team's phone ringing. Print driver updates? Locating another Xerox color printer to reprint the document that looked so bad printed from the LaserJet? How does the user find another Xerox color printer? What if the printer they find isn't the exact model of the printer they used before? Where is the Xerox printer? After all, printing a perfect copy in an office two states away helps no one. Printing two floors away may even be too far for most users.

Printer problems rank either at the top of help desk complaint list, or number two behind password difficulties. Hundreds of printers and related drivers trying to work correctly with hundreds of applications, when multiplied out, gives millions of potential combinations. Of those millions of choices, only one or two work.
Besides the time printer problems requires of technical support, the ill will generated among users grows with every misprinted document. Options to soothe users generally means tech support personnel must go and visit every with a printer problem. Anytime support personnel sit in front of a user's computer, time and money add up quickly. What goes without saying is that support resources that normally support everyone on the network are suddenly tied down to help one system and one printer.

A protocol is a set of rules dictating how one machine will communicate with another machine. The Centronics printer connector and cable are a protocol device of sorts, linking almost any PC with a parallel printer port to a Centronics-enabled printer. Yet a much broader protocol, including many of the situations found in network-based printing, needed to be developed.

The UNIX world had, in the 1980s, developed a set of protocols for serial printers that expanded to support network printers. NetWare 3.x supported that printing protocol as well, but still, that wasn't enough for the growing problems posed by network printing demands.

Novell and Xerox Start Internet Printing Protocol Development
Starting in the summer of 1996, Novell's drive to define a printing protocol for the Internet pulled in other industry players, with Xerox becoming a full partner in the project. The two companies developed a draft specification called the Lightweight Document Printing Application (LDPA).

IBM started working on a proposal for Internet printing themselves called the HyperText Printing Protocol (HTPP) during that same summer. Since the Web really took off in 1995 as Netscape and Internet Explorer browsers become widely available, remote printing became a hot topic for many companies.

Merging Novell/Xerox and IBM's Research

The IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) leadership felt a joint venture merging the work of Novell, Xerox, and IBM should be the start of a special Printer Working Group (PWG) within the IETF. Starting in November, 1996, the group became official (www.pwg.org) and renamed the project IPP for Internet Protocol Printing.

IETF Approval for Internet Printing Protocol and Industry Acceptance

RFC (Request for Comment) 2566 and 2910-1, released in April 1999, defined the IPP Model and Semantics. Version 1.1 of IPP, published as RFC 2911 in September 2000, solidified the IPP work and pulled every major print system vendor into the project. All major new printer products now include IPP support.

A critical decision for the IETF working group was the transport protocol used to support IPP. Two options looked good: creating a printer-specific protocol to ride atop TCP/IP, or lay IPP over HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol). Because HTTP covers the world down to every personal computer or intelligent appliance providing Web access, the decision to ride atop HTTP came easily.

IPP defines ways to make Internet-enabled printing possible, with instructions for hardware manufacturers and software developers. Translating IETF documents into usable products, however, remains the task of network vendors. Standards are only paper, vendors must develop products incorporating those standards.

The best way to illustrate the advantages of iPrint is to look at the printing process through the eyes of a user. In fact, let's look through the eyes of two users, Fred and Ethyl.

Fred, in sales, has a great idea to help persuade a new client to buy their first order of Wonder Widgets. Writing up a quick proposal to illustrate the value of Wonder Widgets and how much money the client will save, Fred adds some pizzazz to the page by writing the client's company name in bright blue, and every mention of how Wonder Widgets will save them money appears in bright green. Fred is not subtle.

Finding Printers

Unfortunately, Fred's personal color printer has been out of ink for two weeks (many users get their own printers, remember, and sales people often don't follow up on details as well as they should). The big color laser printer for the sales department sits on the floor above, somewhere near the sales manager.

Fortunately, Fred's company uses NetWare 6 and iPrint. Fred types the URL www.sales.wonderwidgets.com/iprint and the list of printers in the sales department appears. Since Fred doesn't have a clue what the printer vendor name or model number might be, he clicks on the MAP button. There he finds the sales manager's office (the big one in the corner he wants one day)
and clicks on the color printer in the work area nearby. Fred can tell the difference between the color and black and white printers because the color printers are in color.

One-click Driver Downloads

When Fred clicks the color printer icon, the printer driver and Windows print provider files download immediately, without Fred having to start the process or type anything. Everything Fred needs to print to the upstairs color printer has been loaded onto his system.

Although Fred doesn't usually worry about how full the print queue may be, he notices another button on the Web page labeled Printer Status,
so he tries it. All the printer details he needs, such as the full name of the printer, the fact that it's online, and that no print jobs are stacked
up, give him the confidence to use this printer. Fred knows better than to hang around the sales manager's office unless he has a deal in hand,
and this deal is still cooking.

Back in his word processor application, Fred presses the Print icon and selects the upstairs color laser from the choice of printers that appears. He clicks OK then heads upstairs to grab the proposal before the sales manager notices it.

On the stairs back down to his office, proposal in hand, Fred nearly runs over Ethyl. Proudly he shows her the proposal, along with the special Wonder Widgets he feels the customer needs. Ethyl turns white and asks why he didn't read the memo last week saying they were out of stock on those items. Fred begs and begs Ethyl to find some from another branch, and she finally caves in and agrees to find some.

Special Uses for iPrint

Back at her desk, Ethyl checks the online inventory system, and discovers that the Texas office has plenty of the Wonder Widget model Fred needs. When she tries to order some, however, the inventory system demands paper authorization for inter-office transfer.

Ethyl doesn't trust faxes, because they aren't encrypted during transmission and they lay around the fax machine where anyone in the office can read the pages. She does trust Ricky, however, and decides to send the paper request directly
to him.

Opening the iPrint Web page for the entire company, Ethyl drills down to Texas and then Dallas to find the office where Ricky works. One more click on the Dallas office icon opens the map of the Dallas office, including the printer inside the inventory control room near Ricky's desk. A fast click on that icon downloads, in the background, the correct printer driver for Ethyl to use.

Ethyl types a quick proposal form then prints it to the printer near Ricky. Even though the company doesn't use an encrypted VAN (Value Added Network) between her office and the one in Texas, Ethyl knows that iPrint encrypts print jobs during transit. She clicks the Print icon, and waits 90 seconds. Then her phone rings, and Ricky starts the negotiation process to see if Ethyl will send him some items he needs in exchange for those Wonder Widgets that Fred proposed.

Neither Fred nor Ethyl knew the names of the printers they needed to use, or the names of the drivers required to make the work properly. Neither knew the IP addresses of those printers. But both used new, remote printers without any extra time, trouble, or confusion. Just click the new printer, then print.

Novell took the IPP standard and their own NDPS (Novell Distributed Print Services) and combined the two. The result, iPrint, provides more printing flexibility and ease of use than ever before, as shown by Fred and Ethyl.

iPrint addresses the new network environment in four ways:

Global access to printers
Customizable view of any print environment
Flexible print deployment options
Secure printing

One of the catch phrases for NetWare 6, "Simplify, Secure, Accelerate" aptly describes what Novell has done with iPrint. Novell engineers developed iPrint to simplify the discovery of printers and necessary drivers, send print jobs securely across the Internet, and accelerate user's mastery of their print resources.

Building Upon NDPS

NDPS (Novell Distributed Print Services) appeared with NetWare 4.11 to augment queue-based printing. Combining three earlier network printing pieces (printer, print queue, and print server) into a single Printer Agent object, NDPS provided a graphical administration interface (NetWare Administrator) and streamlined the printing process for users and administrators. NDPS also supports bi-directional communications between the network and smarter printers.

NDPS has grown in ability and acceptance by printer system vendors, making it an excellent foundation for iPrint. The IPP specifications deal with protocols for sending print requests and receiving print information across the Internet. All the backend work of linking print requests to actual physical printers relies on NDPS.

The IPP specifications, embodied in iPrint, add IPP printer support to NDPS. Any printer supported by NDPS will support IPP after iPrint
is installed. There's no need to purchase new printers, since iPrint can communicate with all your existing network printers.

No NetWare Client32 Software Needed, Only a Browser Plugin

Traditional NDPS printers support NetWare clients, and NetWare clients only. IPP specifications call for avoiding such proprietary software as network operating system clients on the workstation.
So Novell engineers came up with a way for any NetWare client to access iPrint using only browser software and some plugins to that browser.

Security still exists, of course, since using iPrint remotely depends on that user having NDS® eDirectory™ authorization to use network resources. But with iPrint and some other new features in NetWare 6, that connection and authorization need not depend on the full, fat, Client32 software at the workstation.

Going back our salesman friend Fred and his proposal request, everything Fred did from his workstation in the office could have been done from any computer with a browser and Internet access. From a hotel on the road? No problem. From home? No problem. From a customer's office? Again, no problem.

Secured and Unsecured Remote Access

Choices concerning security and the level of support for users outside the company firewall accessing iPrint and other network resources must be made, of course. Supporting remote users requires a port be opened in the firewall to allow access to iPrint over IPP. Printers may be designated available to anyone with an iPrint client, or may be restricted to only NDS eDirectory authorized users.

Approached from one direction, the client, the iPrint feature list appears remarkably short: print to any printer quickly and easily without the hassles of print drivers or searching for an appropriate printer, and do it from anywhere with a browser on the Internet. To the administrator, however, this short list appears a bit longer. Luckily, iPrint leverages IPP and NDPS in such a way that NetWare managers comfortable with NDPS print controls have a short learning curve. Tools to build maps and browser pages for users come as part of the iPrint package in NetWare 6, making life easier still.

Browser Interface For Management

NetWare managers, long used to the NetWare Administrator utility under Windows, will enjoy using iManage, a browser-based utility for creating, configuring, and using iPrint resources. Strongly reminiscent of the NetWare Remote Manager Web utility, iManage provides a clean interface for controlling iPrint and NDPS printers and related objects on your network.

Replacing the need for NetWare Administrator under Windows with appropriate plugins, iManage provides a similar feature set to NetWare Administrator plus some new features. The frame on the left side of the screen contains major control functions, and the main screen shows that page with tabs for more detailed functions. Printers, Brokers, and Print Service Managers all are created using iManage. Configuration changes for all print objects under NDPS and iPrint may be made using iManage.

Managers can set defaults for every printer through iPrint. This eases the burden on remote users that don't know or care if there are two paperhandling bins or just one. All the remote printer details can be preset for every printer to maximize quality printouts the first time.

iPrint Map Designer Customizes Printer Locations

Novell iPrint provides icons representing printers for easy drag and drop placement on floorplans. But as clever as the Novell engineers are, they don't know your particular floorplan.

Importing any floorplan from drawings or scanned images takes little effort: simply copy the JPEG, GIF, or BMP file to the MAPS directory on your iPrint server. The Map Creation tool also allows you to draw your own floorplan with drag and drop bathroom, cubicle, and general landmark drawings and other architectural features. Many companies find a list of locations with drill-down office addresses and printer descriptions work just as well as maps.

The iPrint Map Designer provides icons for laser, color, inkjet, and dot matrix printers, as well as a copy machine icon. The printer icon size option includes five choices ranging from smallest to largest, so every map scale can have reasonably sized printer icons. If you choose the wrong size for a printer, simply click on that printer in the work area and change the size from the drop down menu.

Of course, once you select a usable printer icon size, each printer type will appear as that size. Drag the printer icon (or copy machine icon) onto the workspace (called the sandbox) and drop it where desired. The iPrint Map Designer handles all the overlay details for combining the map image and the newly-place printer icons.

Each printer icon can include a caption or description. The printer URL is attached through the iPrint Map Designer as well. This process isn't quite as easy as cutting and pasting pictures in kindergarten, but almost.

More ambitious administrators have a full palette of embedded objects available for printer feedback and client interaction. These HTML interfaces include:

Get client information (i.e. client version)
Install printer
Remove printer
Get printer status
Get printer details
Pause/resume printer
List/purge jobs
Print test page
Send printer ready file
Get job info
Hold/release/cancel job

HTML code samples and sample code applications make further customization quick and easy. Two sets of examples are placed on the iPrint server when the program is installed, including the maps and printer installation code used by Novell for their own employees.

Browser Interface for Users

The iPrint user sees a Web page, again modeled after NetWare Remote Manager, that provides
the information they need. All iPrint printers (including NDPS printers if the administrator has IPP-enabled those printers) with Internet access enabled automatically populate the Web page for users. An option to "Install iPrint Client" appears for users in the left-side frame of the Web page.

A Printer Operations page drills down to individual printer details such as printer status, name, online or not, and special features such as duplex paper-handling. More information for users, in a friendly format, means fewer support calls.

iPrint Client Only a Browser Plugin

Any user without the iPrint client software need slow down only a little on their way to printing to an iPrint device. The iPrint client software downloads quickly in zipped format, then, with your permission, unzips itself and installs in the background. Once running, the iPrint Web browser plugin "client" takes only 1.2Mb on the system.

When a new printer connection is needed, the critical portion of the iPrint plugin client works behind the scenes with Microsoft Windows on the client system. Under cover, the iPrint plugin adds the correct printer driver files and adds the specific printer model to the list of available printers on the client system. When the user hits Ctrl-P or clicks the print icon, they will find the necessary printer details waiting for them (pre-configured by the administrator) inside their Windows print modules. Click the printer they want and iPrint handles all the details.

Macintosh clients use the Macintosh Desktop Printer Utility to link to a printer and enable LPR support for the printer. Print jobs then route through LPR/LPD printing to the NDPS system on the server.

Printers Forever or Printers for a Day

Most users sit at the same computer in the same office, and use the same printer(s) time after time. When these users go to iPrint the first time, they want their invisibly-installed printer drivers to remain on their systems forever. They also feel comfortable that when their desktop operating system crashes and gets reloaded, they can again find and install printer support easily.

One way to describe this behavior, the way used by the IPP Working Group, is to define these printers as "persistent" printers. When these drivers install, they plan to stay on that system.

Other users rarely use the same computer system twice, as in temporary employees using various workstations around the office. And some users rarely use the same printer twice, such as mobile users connecting their portable systems
to the office network for a day or two before moving to the next office.

Mobile users need "non-persistent" printer setups which disappear when the system reboots or delete themselves after a set amount of time. Administrators supporting these users can define the same printer two ways: persistent and non-persistent, to help these users. By indicating in the description, caption, or through a different colored icon that a printer setup will disappear after a time, mobile users get the printer setup they need. What they don't get are scores of printers drivers clogging up their system.

Novell created the market for "file and print" network services in the 1980s. Now, network printing moves to the Internet with easy client Web pages simplifying printing more than ever before.

Any user with a browser using iPrint can download the small iPrint plugin for their browser. Once installed, that user can search HTML maps to find printer information and location never available until NetWare 6. Missing print drivers disappear from the list of computer aggravations as iPrint and NetWare 6 download correct printer drivers in the background while not interrupting the user.

Is "file and print" dying? Not when NetWare 6 and iPrint make printing a two step operation: Click. Print. Period.

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