Spooling
Spooling
A ‘print spooler’ is a piece of software that intercepts and stores on a storage device files that have been sent to a printer. It then takes over the management of the transfer of the files from the computer to the printer. The computer (a very fast device) is therefore freed up from the task of printing (a very slow operation) so you don’t suffer from the problem of ‘speed mismatch’, where you have to work at the speed of the slowest device. The print spooler can receive lots of jobs at the same time from lots of different applications.
On a network, you might be waiting a long time while other print jobs are being serviced and the printer becomes free. The print spooler collects and stores on a storage device all the jobs sent to the printer, queues them all up by creating a queue of references to each file that needs to be printed (and prioritises them if necessary) and then sends them to the printer as and when the printer is free. This is known as ‘de-spooling’. Everyone can send their printing jobs at any time from any application and their application will be immediately freed up.
Print management software
The network manager can configure the print spooler software on a network. That means, for example, that she could set up the spooler software to make some people's print jobs more important than others. When they send a print job, their work jumps straight to the front of the print queue! Sometimes, organisations buy a further piece of software, known as 'print management software' to provide the network manager with even more print management features.
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- Printing is costly. It costs a lot of money to buy paper and ink cartridges.
- If one person is printing a huge amount of work that is unfair to people who are waiting, perhaps to print small jobs. If this keeps happening people will get annoyed! Print management software can allow organisations to identify people who are printing huge amounts and to take appropriate action if necessary.
- Organisations need to budget for resources. Print management software helps them to do this by providing information about how much is being printed and by whom and then controlling it.
- Costs can be allocated to printouts so that printing costs can be charged to projects.
With this type of software, you could, for example,
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- Produce reports showing how many copies were printed by each user on the network.
- Automatically generate charges for individuals who over-print.
- Set limits on how much a person can print in any particular time period.
- Prevent certain people accessing certain (expensive) resources, for example, colour printers.
- Prevent people from printing at all, or allowing them to print only at certain times.