FITS OM: How Print and Output Management works
The print and output operational function is a key component of the overall ICT system administration. Print and Output Management is concerned with the operational and maintenance aspects of computer output. The function defines and maintains output resources.
Tasks involved in defining print and output resources
- Developing plans for deploying output devices across the network in the most effective way
- Developing the appropriate policies and procedures for managing the output devices
Tasks involved in maintaining the output resources
- Developing the appropriate procedures for monitoring output resources (that is, availability, capacity and performance)
- Keeping output resources in a usable state and in accordance with school requirements
- Predicting future output needs, based on current trends and changing school requirements
We usually mean printers when we talk about output devices, and in our normal day-to-day work this is probably correct. However, we need to consider a broader range of output devices before we can begin to think about implementing Print and Output Management.
- Printing
The printer is generally the prime device for producing output from a computer. In one form or another, it produces a 'hard copy' on paper for the user to read and archive.
- Publishing to the intranet or internet
HTML output can be generated for immediate display in a browser. Instead of publishing it onto paper, you can format it, hold it on disk and make it available to anyone in the school (or indeed anywhere) to read, provided they have access to a browser and know where to find the HTML file (its network address).
Where users have ready access to browsers, this is a useful output mechanism for common information that does not change often (such as information about the school).
- Fax
Facsimile transmission is generally used to send hard copy to people or an organisation outside the school. There are three main ways of faxing outbound information:
- Printing and faxing the data
- Submitting the data to a device on the network, called a network fax server
- Submitting the data to a service on the internet, called an internet fax server.
A network fax server is a device that receives a document (for example, a word processor document) over the computer network and transmits that document over the telephone network to a fax machine.
An internet fax server is a service (internet based) that will accept an input, usually an email, and transmit this as a fax in the usual way.
Both network fax and internet fax use either queuing or mailbox facilities and faxes are always accepted by the service without any delay.
- Portable document format (PDF)
Unless you are printing hard copy, when an application generates an output, it generally does so in a specific electronic format (for example, word processor, spreadsheet or presentation). Unless the recipient has the same application, it may be difficult for them to read the output.
PDF was developed as an independent electronic format that enables you to view documents on any kind of system or computer, provided you use a specific software viewer to read the PDF file. You can download the viewer free of charge over the internet.
Anyone with a PDF viewer will be able to read any output in the PDF format, whether or not you are using the same kind of operating system with the same software that produced the original output file.
Whereas HTML is a format designed for screen display, PDF is designed for print output. However, PDF viewers generally integrate seamlessly with internet browsers, giving you a convenient method of viewing documents on the internet plus the option to print them out.
Email is a type of output used to send messages from one user to another. Not only does email cater for the creation of output via simple ASCII text, many email readers support HTML encoding in the message body, and also enable the attachment of other files (word processor documents, spreadsheets etc).