CUPS - Open Source Multi-Printer Management
Those working in an environment with multiple printers, each either doing specific jobs or capable of multi-tasking, have to tackle management. In an office with ten computers and as many printers, this can quickly get hairy. Especially when looking at some of the high-cost systems that are too much for a small office of this size, but more than the simpler solutions will allow.
The answer may be in the open source management software CUPS.
What is CUPS?
CUPS is a fully open source solution for printer management. It's capable of handling a few or hundreds of printers and it has a lot of features that even the expensive options don't have. Some of those include:
The ability to send a print job to multiple printers so that if the first is not available, the next can do it and so on down the line. For rush prints and similar needs, this can be a lifesaver. CUPS will tell you which printer ultimately got the job so that you know where to find your work.
Printer classes so that the administrator can create groups of printers that have specific access requirements. This way, for example, the printer on the boss' desk won't be part of the pool except for the boss and his assistant. These classes also allow for easy multi-printer availability (as above) with the selection of only one printer. It also allows delineation so that some types of jobs won't be sent to some printers on the network - a colour job to a black and white laser-jet, for instance.
Those two abilities mean that CUPS can do what most commercial products cannot. CUPS can install on most Apple or UNIX-like operating systems for the network.
How CUPS could work in a small office.
In our sample office above, we had ten computers and ten printers. Four of the printers are the same make and model, two are black-and-white only laser-jets, and the rest are different models of inkjet of low quality and resolution.
Once CUPS is installed on the network, we could create three classes of printer in order to control how these are used. The four ink-jets of quality are our 'Colour Inkjet' class. The two laser-jets become 'B/W Inkjet' and the four low-quality ink-jets become our 'Low Qual Color Inkjet' class. One of the quality ink-jets is in the boss' office, so we create another class called 'Boss Only' that only allows access to that printer by the people we designate.
Continued on the next page
Follow Technorati