Print Spooling

Print Spooling: Overview

When it comes to printing, there are ultimately just two ways of doing it:  directly to the printer, or through an intermediate print spooling system.  There are considerable advantages with choosing the latter.

Print Spooling:  Challenges

If everything works smoothly, then printing directly to the printer can do the job.  However, you should use a print spooler if you care about things such as:

• what happens if a printer is down

• what gets printed first

• who is printing what where

• confirmation of successful printing

Print Spooling:  Barr Systems' Solution

The Barr Enterprise Print Server includes a very powerful spooler.

Our print spooler gives you complete control of printing and routing network documents. You can direct files from the LAN, Windows programs, or host computers to a variety of destinations, including printers and other hosts.

You can manage the routing of all documents from a single, combined print queue. At a glance, you get a comprehensive view of all documents and printers, instead of having to open separate windows to view individual Windows queues for each destination device. You can also fully customize the queue display. While the spool is operating, you can sort the documents a variety of ways and change what type of information displays for each document without interrupting spool activity.

Control of documents and printers is at your fingertips. You can manually change document routing criteria, such as copies and priority, by editing the information displayed on screen. With a click of the mouse, you can start and stop all spool activity, start and stop individual documents or printers, or send commands to reset printers. If a printer jams, you can quickly redirect documents to another device.

Advanced features include routing copies of a single document to several different printers or automatically overriding document routing criteria.  We also log all the actions in a SQL database, thus providing reporting capabilities.