HP Distributed Print Service Administration Guide

26 Chapter1
Introducing HP Distributed Print Service
What Are the Benefits of HPDPS?
What Are the Benefits of HPDPS?
HPDPS is a product that facilitates and simplifies printing in a network
environment.
Whether your printing environment is small with a single print server, a
few printers, and a handful of users, or whether you support thousands
of users and a wide array of printing hardware, HPDPS lets you make
the most of your print environment by helping you to:
• Use your existing printers, applications, and print commands.
Your users can submit jobs from their existing applications and use
the same printcommands they have always used by simply specifying
the names of HPDPS printers as the destinations for their jobs.
• Migrate to HPDPS print environment at your own pace.
There are no set minimum or maximum capacities in HPDPS; you
can easily expand your system to include more clients, printers,
servers, and queues. With this flexibility, you can start with a
minimum HPDPS configuration installed on just one or two systems
on a local area network (LAN). Later, you can expand your print
environment as needed without requiring your users to change the
way they print their jobs.
• Receive notification of printing system events as they happen.
HPDPS provides event notification information that informs you,
your users, and your printer operators when specific actions are
required. For example, you can receive notification when jobs are
backlogged in a queue and you can notify operators when the printers
they are responsible for are out of paper. Your users can receive
notification if HPDPS cannot schedule their jobs at the requested
destination. The types of notification are highly configurable; you can
ensure that the appropriate people are notified when significant
events occur. Event messages also provide you with valuable
information that can alert you to a problem within the print
environment and help you isolate the cause of the problem.
• Manage and monitor your entire print environment from anywhere
within your network if you choose to run HPDPS within what is
called a DCE Extended Environment. See “The Two HPDPS
Environments” later in this chapter for more information.