April 29, 1997
The Printer Working Group, a coalition of key worldwide printing experts representing many printer and print server vendors, today announced a major effort to establish standards that will make printing on the Internet easier and more productive.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has chartered the Internet Printing Protocol Working Group with the creation of a single standard interface for printing on the Internet. Built on existing Internet technologies, the Internet Printing Protocol, or IPP, will be quickly deployed to provide easy to use printing interfaces across a broad range of printing systems and operating systems which will inter-operate using the protocol.
"Just as there exists a standard protocol for browsing documents on the World Wide Web, it is critical that key printing industry players implement a standard protocol for submitting documents over the Internet to remote printers. With active participation by major printer, browser, and networking companies, the IPP Working Group is on a fast track to provide such a solution," said Charles LeCompte, President, Lyra Research Inc.
Currently, there is no standard for Internet print job submission and in order to meet a wide variety of customer printing needs, printer vendors today must support a number of different protocols and variants. There is a need for a single protocol which can cover the most common requirements for printing on the Internet and intranets, including locating a printer and viewing its status and capabilities, as well as submitting, monitoring and canceling a print job.
"This new working group will define a new industry-standard print submission and control protocol allowing end users to submit and control print jobs over the Internet and across enterprise intranets," said Don Wright, Chair of the Printer Working Group and Lexmark International's Manager of Strategic Alliances. "We are fortunate to have all the major printer, printing, and print server companies participating in this effort including Adobe, Canon, Dataproducts, DAZEL, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Kyocera, Lexmark, Microsoft, Netscape Communications Corporation, Novell, Osicom/DPI, QMS, Ricoh, SDSU/Start Tech, Sharp, Sun Microsystems, Tektronix, TrueSpectra, Underscore and Xerox."
The Internet Printing Protocol is expected to be a client/server protocol that allows the server to be either a separate print server or a printer with embedded networking and server capabilities. The focus of this effort is optimized for printers, but it could also be applied to other output devices.
Chartered by the PWG, the Internet Printing Protocol working group was formed in November 1996 and began developing necessary standards for print job submission and monitoring for the Internet based on early submissions by IBM, Novell and Xerox.
After a successful "Birds of a Feather" session at the December1996 IETF meeting in San Jose, CA, this group was also charteredby the IETF on March 6, 1997. The PWG earlier developed the SNMP Printer MIB (RFC1759) and is currently working on a Job Monitoring MIB; both are IETF projects.
Representatives from Adobe, IBM, Lexmark, Novell, Sun, and Xerox act as chairs, authors, and editors for the IPP project. Internet drafts
Internet drafts covering requirements, model and semantics, directory schema, security, and the protocol have been submitted to the IETF and will continue to be revised and become Request for Comments (RFCs).
The first formal meeting of the IPP working group at an IETF meeting was held in Memphis, TN on April 8th.
The Internet Printing Protocol is expected to revolutionize printing in the computer industry. It will provide a single standard interface for interrogating the capabilities and state of a printing system, submitting a print job, and monitoring the state of that print job.
IPP will be quickly deployed to provide easy to use printing interfaces across a broad range of printing systems and operating systems which will inter-operate using the protocol.
"Just as there exists a standard protocol for browsing documents on the World Wide Web, it is critical that key printing industry players implement a standard protocol for submitting documents over the Internet to remote printers. With active participation by major printer, browser, and networking companies, the IPP Working Group is on a fast track to provide such a solution," said Charles LeCompte, President, Lyra Research.
The following examples illustrate some of the capabilities made possible by widespread deployment of the protocol:
IPP will provide a cost-effective and reliable way to print documents such as reports, invoices, schedules, and forms to remote printers which today are often sent over long-distance telephone lines using fax.
"Computer users will be able to print to printers anywhere within their organization, independent of locations, and can just as easily send print jobs to customers, partners etc. without the need to use e-mail or other distribution methods before documents are printed," said Carl-Uno Manros, co-chair of the IPP working group and Principal Engineer with Xerox Corporation.
"We are building upon the long, successful experiences of this group developing printing job submission and management standards," added Steve Zilles, co-chair of the IPP working group and Manager of Standards for Adobe.
Chartered by the PWG, the Internet Printing Protocol working group was formed in November 1996 and began developing the necessary standards for print job submission and monitoring for the Internet based on early submissions by IBM, Novell and Xerox.
After a successful "Birds of a Feather" session at the December 1996 IETF meeting in San Jose, CA, this group was also chartered by the IETF on March 6, 1997. The PWG earlier developed the SNMP Printer MIB (RFC1759) and is currently working on a Job Monitoring MIB; both are IETF projects. Representatives from Adobe, IBM, Lexmark, Novell, Sun Microsystems, and Xerox act as chairs, authors, and editors for the IPP project. Internet drafts covering requirements, model and semantics, directory schema, security, and the protocol have been submitted to the IETF and will continue to be revised and become Request for Comments (RFCs). The first formal meeting of the IPP working group at an IETF meeting was held in Memphis, TN on April 8, 1997.
The IPP Working Group is open to any company or individual interested in developing new standards for Internet printing. The group meets regularly in person and on telephone conference calls. More information about the group and specific technical details are available over the Internet in the following ways:
General Discussion e-mail distribution list: ipp@pwg.org
To Subscribe to the e-mail distribution list: ipp-request@pwg.org
Archive: ftp://ftp.pwg.org/pub/pwg/ipp/
Web-site: http://www.pwg.org/ipp
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a large international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. It is open to any interested individual. The actual technical work of the IETF is done in its working groups, which are organized by topic into several areas (e.g. routing, network management, security, etc.). Further information about the IETF can be accessed on the World Wide Web at http://www.ietf.org.
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PWG Chair: Don Wright, Lexmark International, 606-232-4808
IPP Chairs: Carl-Uno Manros, Xerox Corporation, 310-333-8273
Steve Zilles, Adobe Inc., 408-536-4766