Subject: PWG-ANNOUNCE> Printer Discovery

From: "Zehler, Peter" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 12:07:03 -0400

All,

I hope most of you have seen some of the conversations that have been going
on regarding the advertisement of Printers and Print Services in the
Srvloc-discuss group on sourceforge.  I believe some has been forwarded to
the IPP list.  I am hoping the PWG can take up the issue of printer
advertisement.

The advertisement of printers and of their channels (i.e. access protocols
and points) should be of interest across our companies.  It would be
mutually beneficial to codify the use of service advertisement for printing.
A number of technologies exist such as SLP, LDAP, JNDI and SSDP.  

We have templates for some of these however the mapping between them may
have some complications.  We have an existing PWG straw man proposal on how
SSDP would be used in an existing SSDP environment.  We should have
recommendations on how printers make use of all the advertisement
technologies to insure interoperability in heterogeneous environments.

There are many optional attributes that may be of general benefit to printer
discovery and might be useful to populate.  Another issue is how many print
channels should a printer advertise and what the exact mechanism should be
to make the associated channels of the printer visible.  Some solutions may
require the ability to identify multiple advertisements of a printer service
as belonging to the same device.

The outcome of this discussion should be a PWG document with recommendations
regarding service advertising.  The issues that we uncover/address can be
fed back into other standards bodies addressing service advertising.  (I
would hope the path we take would not be printer specific and can be applied
generally)

I propose that this conversation be held on the [email-masked] list initially. 
Please do not respond on the [email-masked] list

I hope that we can find some time in Toronto to discuss this work.

Pete

				Peter Zehler
				XEROX
				Xerox Architecture Center
				Email: [email-masked]
				Voice:    (716) 265-8755
				FAX:      (716) 265-8792 
				US Mail: Peter Zehler
				        Xerox Corp.
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				        M/S 128-69E 
				        Webster NY, 14580-9701