HP Distributed Print Service Administration Guide

56 Chapter3

Planning Your HPDPS Conﬁguration

Planning Overview

As you begin planning your HPDPS environment, you need to consider

how to do the following, while optimizing your resources and meeting the

needs of your users:

• 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.

Here are some additional things you may need to do: