Welcome to ROCTalk! We’ve designed this area of our website to communicate better with our customers, and those of you who are just taking a look. If you have comments or suggestions for future installments or would like more information about a blog that you've read, please let us know
Do you have a group of printers that are the same model, or at least have the same capabilities? If so, take advantage of using them to better suit your needs, by making them a member of a ‘pool’ destination.
A ‘pool’ destination will have ‘members’, to which the members are the physical printers, or even another pool destination. The other important characteristic of a pool destination, is it’s ‘Pool priority’, which tells it how to use it’s members.
There is:
presentation – start with the first printer that was added to the pool (printer A)
round robin – start with the printer that follows the last printer used (e.g., if printer B was the last printer used, printer C would be used next)
least recently used – print on the printer that has been idle the longest
all destinations – print the entire document on each of the defined members, which can also be ‘lpsalias’ names, so that options are added without user intervention
failover* – in the order in which the members were added, this failover pool will use the next attached printer to send its spool file to.
*available only in version 7.5 and later
On top of this, you also have the ability to control the members in regards to the minimum or maximum amount of pages they are allowed to print. This allows the pool to become a traffic cop, allowing smaller jobs to print only on A and B, and larger jobs to print on C and D, all the while, the users are spooling to the same pool destination.
Going swimming in a pool destination can help make things easy for you and the users.