What Are the Benefits of HPDPS?

Use your existing printers, applications, and print commands.

Your users can submit jobs from their existing applications and use the same print commands 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.

When using DCE, HPDPS gives you the ability to configure and monitor your network printing system from any HPDPS client on your system. You can configure and monitor printers, servers, and queues. You can also configure default settings for the jobs your users submit to HPDPS-managed printers.

When you use DCE, you enable expanded security as well as single-point administration of distributed features for print management. See Chapter 8 “Managing DCE Security for HPDPS ” for more information.

Implement an industry-leading printing technology.

HPDPS is an object-oriented print environment based on the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Document Printing Application (DPA) 10175-1 standard.