Overview: Novell Distributed Printing System

NDPS (Novell Distributed Printing System) is a stable and mature printing technology that has been built into NetWare since the days of NetWare 5.0. It replaces the standard queue based printing that you may still be using. So why should you use NDPS?

NDPS has many features that will save your company an incredible amount of time and money on support costs. The following items highlight the key features:

• All printer drivers and configurations can be automatically distributed to the workstations with no end-user interaction or downtime. This might be difficult to picture if you haven't seen it first hand, but it is an absolutely incredible feature that will save hours or even days.
  
  Think about this -- With your current system, what is required to install a new printer? First, you open the printer control panel, click on add printer, then you browse the network for the right printer and hopefully you can find it. Next you have to tell Windows what brand and model the printer is. And by the way, what happens if Windows doesn't have the driver? And oh, you have 500 people that all need the same printer. Yikes!
  
  Now, start over with NDPS. It can be easily installed into the Novell NDS system. Configuring the printer is a snap. The printer can then be associated with a group of people (most likely in an "OU" or Organizational Unit). When users login to the network, the printer drivers and configurations will be automatically downloaded to the workstations. Yes, all 500 users receive the printer automatically with no interaction on their part. What an incredible time saver!
  
• Status of all printers can be monitored from the server console. It's easy to see in a glance the status of all printers. Prior to NDPS, it was very difficult and time consuming to get an overview, and when problems occurred they were difficult to troubleshoot.
  
• All printers are centrally managed within NetWare Administrator or iManager . Prior to NDPS, each printer vendor required a proprietary interface to configure their own brand of printers. Most of them were bulky and difficult to configure.
  
• NDPS is backward compatible. You can implement NDPS at your own pace and without disrupting your current queue based system. NDPS has the ability to service existing print queues.
  
• NDPS does not cost extra. It is included with all current distributions of NetWare since NetWare 5.0.

If you have any questions about NDPS or any other networking technology, please feel free to contact us here or call us at 1-888-690-0013.