The customer associated with this case study is a leading specialized publisher and services provider located in the state of Wisconsin in the United States. They offer a wide spectrum of ready-made and custom safety and regulatory compliance products to customers throughout North America in industries such as transportation, manufacturing, utility, construction, food processing, and food service. They help their customers comply with DOT, OSHA, EPA, FDA, and USDA requirements. The company's diverse product line includes technical publications; computer software; video-based, online, and CD-ROM training programs; specialized forms; and supplies. Additionally, they provide safety consulting, on-site training and a variety of transportation services, including licensing, permitting, fuel tax reporting and driver log auditing.
Business Problem - The customer had implemented a and print management system based on OpenSpool from HP. HP has discontinued OpenSpool and has announced plans to discontinue support very soon. This situation created the problem of needing to replace a discontinued product. Additionally, the customer had a desire to move more functions related to print administration from the IT department to the end users to reduce the workload on the IT staff. Doing so would streamline operations and administration within the organization with respect to their print operations, improving efficiency and increasing productivity. HP presented Dazel as an alternative to OpenSpool for the customer to consider. Dazel was not a fit at this customer due to its high price and the extensive effort to implement it within their environment. Their testing also indicated that Dazel would be difficult for their end users to use due to its complexity and therefore defeat main objective, moving print administration from the IT department out to the end users in their company.
Key Technical Challenge - The solution that the customer would choose needed to provide the same functionality as their OpenSpool implementation and more. The new solution needed to support the proprietary "-o"* commands that HP had built into OpenSpool. The new solution also needed to be easy to install to reduce the risk during the conversion and finally, it needed to be intuitive and easy for the end users to utilize with little or no training.
Technical Environment
Four HP-UX 11i servers
SAP and several in house developed applications
Interoperating with Jetform-electronic forms from Adobe
100 print queues, multiple printer manufacturers and models around the campus
120 + end users
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Technical Solution
After the customer evaluated several leading advanced print spooling solutions, they selected Plus Technologies' print spooler solution, OM Plus. At the conclusion of their evaluation, the customer provided the following information about how they found OM Plus to be the best solution for replacing OpenSpool vs. the other solutions evaluated:
It was easier to install and use
It had better forms management
It had better text and PCL viewing capability
It had superior tech support
It was easier to set up a printer in OM Plus
It had better security and user privilege management
It had OpenSpool "-o" command line compatibility
It offered a robust print job Archive solution
Plus Technologies provided the best value and was the most responsive vendor
Implementation
Installing, configuring, testing and training were completed in a matter of just two days. A Plus Technologies engineer was on-site to assist the customer with installation of the OM Plus software and to provide configuration assistance. Since OM Plus supports all of the unique HP OpenSpool "-o" command line parameters the customer could implement OM Plus seamlessly across their enterprise without having to make any changes to the printing environment.
