Subject: IPP>REQ - customer value statement for press release

From: Roger K Debry <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Apr 1997 12:35:12 -0400

Classification:
Prologue:
Epilogue: Roger K deBry
Senior Techncial Staff Member
Architecture and Technology
IBM Printing Systems
email: [email-masked]
phone: 1-303-924-4080

The state of printing in the computer industry today can be compared to that of
the railroad industry prior to the standardization of track guage, there are
lots of systems (railroads), but little interoperability.  And just as
standardization in the railroad industry allowed multiple railroad systems to
interoperate and move freight and passengers across an entire continent in an
uninterrupted flow, so will IPP revolutionize printing in the computer
industry.  The Internet Printing Protocol 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. Built on
existing existing Internet technologies, IPP will be quickly deployed to
provide easy to use printing interfaces across a broad range of printing
systems and operating systems which will interoperate using the protocol. The
following examples illustrate some of the capabilities made possible by
widespread deployment of the protocol:

A researcher wants to print a technical report on a shared departmental
printer. This particular report is stored in several standard print formats on
a publically available web site at a well known university. The researcher
finds a suitable printer using a web browser, then submits the print request to
his local printing system, providing the URL of the document to be printed. The
printing system fetches the document from the web site and prints it, notifying
the researcher when the job is complete.

An independent insurance agent wants to print a copy of a report on a
publically available printer back at the home office of one of the insurance
companies that she represents. She brings up her application, selects print
from the file menu, and types in the URL of the home office's public printer.
The request is transmitted to the printing system in the home office and
printed.