Remote office printing solutions?

L

Loki008

2[H]4U
Joined
Jan 14, 2001
Messages
2,678
I have been looking for the best solution for printing in remote offices. Here is our scenerio

We have a main office in CT, 2 smaller offices in CT, 2 offices in NY, as well as an office in Boston, and one in Florida. So one main office and 6 smaller offices.

We do database hosting where paper and electronic documents are converted to TIFF format and put into a database. The problem comes when trying to print from anywhere but the main office. The print spool decompresses into a massive amount of data that can cause the printing to slow to a crawl over the WAN links.

I have been looking into a way that will compress the print job while it is transmitted over the WAN rather than sending the decompressed job over the wire. Does anyone have any recomendations on how to best manage this? I have been looking into ThinPrint's .print Connected Gateway, but havent found too much in terms of reviews for this product.

For the most part we would prefer to avoid TS or Citrix use.

Thanks
 
I am sure there is a program that compresses all documents to a .pdf and then is send back to print.
 
PDF documents can get pretty big when they're spooled too.

I've been putting in 15+ hour days and I'm kind of brain fried right now, so bear with me if I'm not seeing the big picture.


You're trying to print from the remote office to a printer in a remote office? If so, why not set the printer up on a print server and print direct IP to the printer. That will take the traffic off your WAN links.

Yeah... I think I'm missing what you're trying to say. I'm going to go home and go to bed now, lol.


There are hardware solutions that you can put in place to compress the data as it traverses your WAN links. It's a piece of hardware that sits on either side of your WAN link and compresses/decompresses. We use Riverbeds and they seem to get the job done.
 
As a start, if you are using site to site VPNs and your devices support it, you could enable IP compression on the tunnels.
 
Reminds me of a setup we used to use, though not over WAN links. We installed what were called zip print cards in the printers themselves. They could then be sent zipped jobs and natively decompress them to .TIFF. I don't even think the company exists anymore...

As stated previously, it looks like you're going to need some type of gateway device on each side. I would bet you could do it with a *nix setup, piping it across using scp. There doesn't seem to be an easy solution to this. What kind of printers are they? Have you contacted them to see what they suggest? Sounds like a cop out, but I'm sure you're not the first to have to do this. :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top