Planning Overview

Manage your printers

HPDPS gives you the ability to manage all of your printers as network resources. You can set up a configuration that gives users with common job requirements access to a particular printer or set of printers that support their jobs.

Distribute your printer workload

In a typical networked environment, some printers might be idle most of the time. Other printers in the network might have a backlog of jobs waiting to print at certain times of the day or might even be backlogged most of the day. You can set up a configuration that routes jobs to any of several printers that are capable of printing the jobs.

These first two considerations are complimentary. By using each printer as a network resource and by optimizing the use of each printer, you can distribute the printing demands on your network among all of your available printers.

Distribute the system workload

By balancing the printer workload, you can also optimize the use of the network systems that support printing. These systems can use a significant amount of their resources to accept, schedule, and process jobs and to manage the printers that the systems control. System resources include processing time, memory, and fixed disk capacity. If you distribute your jobs to several HPDPS servers running on a number of systems, you will distribute the printing demands of your organization more evenly among those systems.

Control jobs and documents

You might want to use different job or document defaults for specific printers or for individual user groups. When you configure your system, you should consider when and how you plan to use defaulting, and how to use it most effectively.

Support users who submit jobs from an HPDPS client or who submit print requests from applications or with the LP spooler print commands such as lp and lpstat.

You will want to make planning decisions for your user groups based on their printing needs as well as the availability of hardware.

Manage remote and local printer devices.

The management capability provided by HPDPS allows you to centrally manage all of your printer devices. For example, you can locate printer devices in close proximity to your users, monitoring the printers and job flow no matter where the printers reside.

Alert appropriate personnel of printer problems.

The notification services HPDPS provides allow you to send printer and job event messages to the appropriate personnel as significant events occur.

Understanding how users currently print jobs, the location of your printer devices, and how you will support your print environment will help you make the transition to HPDPS more smoothly.