Has this happened to you? You sent a print job to a printer and walked across the office just to be met with an empty tray with no indication of what went wrong. Output Management’s newest solution, Confirmed Delivery, can prevent the frustrating walkback. Using widely supported printer commands, we can get confirmation from the printer itself that direct IP print jobs were successful, preventing the troubleshooting headache.
Why Confirmed Delivery?
Confirmed Delivery gives you real-time status updates of your direct IP print jobs from the printer itself. This gives you better insight into what’s happening with your print jobs without getting up and checking the printer manually. In addition to being notified about any problems the printer has while completing the job, Confirmed Delivery also makes job status reporting with ERPs (like SAP) and print stats with PrinterLogic much more accurate.
You probably have additional questions, and we’ve got answers. Let’s dive in.
How do I receive print job status updates?
Many modern printers support the command language, Print Job Language (PJL) developed by HP. Output Management today uses PJL commands to communicate job parameters such as Copies, Paper Tray, and Duplex to the printer.
When the Output Management Service Client sends a direct IP print job to a printer with Confirmed Delivery enabled, it sends PJL USTATUS headers to the printer. These headers request the printer to reply to the Output Management Service Client with various updates about the job as they happen. These updates include printer status, tray status, printed pages, running out of paper, job cancellation, and print success.
Output Management will then wait a configurable amount of time for a response from the printer. If you don’t receive a response within that window of time, it could be due to a couple of reasons:
A printer issue that requires user intervention (i.e. the printer ran out of paper). In this case, you’re given a configurable window of time to fix the printer’s issue so the job may automatically resume.
PJL USTATUS is not supported on your printer. In this case, the print job is treated as a regular Output Management job. You’ll receive the standard confirmation that the printer received the job.
How does this benefit me?
Seamless print redirection
With more accurate job failure reporting, if the printer reports a job failure, that trigger can hook directly into Rules & Routing for quick job redirection to another printer. This helps ensure that business-critical printing isn’t stopped by one printer mishap.
Accurate print stats
If a job is canceled or fails part way through, the printer can report how many pages it has already printed. This greatly improves the accuracy of your print stats, especially if your past-canceled jobs would have otherwise been marked as complete successes.
Better print debugging
With trace or debug level logging enabled on the Output Management Service Client, you can get useful information from your printer about how it’s handling a given job and see the exact response from the printer in the logs.
Now, how do I enable it?
At the time of writing, Confirmed Delivery is enabled similarly to Off-Network Printing.
There are three components to enabling confirmed delivery:
The global toggle that enables the feature
The behavior that printers follow by default
The printer-specific behavior
Confirmed Delivery can be turned on and off at any point at the global level (within the Admin Console). This keeps you in control of your job’s progress and ignores all other settings. By default, every printer follows the global behavior of having Confirmed Delivery enabled or disabled. This is useful when creating new printers and controlling which printers already use Confirmed Delivery.
Additionally, each printer can optionally override the default behavior and use its specific Confirmed Delivery behavior. For example, you could have Confirmed Delivery set to disabled by default but enable it for a specific printer.
The first two components are global settings inside of PrinterLogic. Once logged in, navigate to Tools > Settings > General > Confirmed Delivery. The printer-specific settings are located on the printer’s Port tab.
Where can I find out more?
With Output Management Confirmed Delivery, you can rest easy knowing that your output makes it where it needs to be, in the format it needs to be in, and when it needs to be there. Most importantly, you won’t have to walk over to an empty printer tray. If you have additional questions, refer to our FAQ.
Schedule a demo today and let’s have a conversation about improving your output processes.
Josh is a Software Engineer at Vasion. He works predominantly on PrinterLogic features including the Output Management Bundle, Confirmed Delivery, and Rules & Routing.