Applying Print Agent Updates

Bump

Print Agent service must be applied manually.  There are multiple reasons for this.  Print Agent services should be tailored to match up with a customer’s own physical locations.  If a customer has a central site they could possibly get by with a single Print Agent service.  If they have multiple sites they would likely want a Print Agent service for each site.  Print Agent services should be as close to a customer’s physical printer devices as possible and ought to part of the same network domain.  To do otherwise is to work against the intent and design of Print Agent functionality.

The Print Agent tool has been designed to minimize network traffic of our customers.  A working Print Agent service polls for print jobs which have been stored in a customer’s database in a compressed format.  When it finds such jobs it pulls them in, decompresses them and sends them to the designated printer (hopefully a local one).  By sending compressed jobs to localized PA services data traffic on the customer’s network is minimized.

In IFS Support (GSD) we sometimes come across customers who have a single Print Agent service running for all printers of their various locations.  These locations can be separated by thousands of miles / km.  In such cases we typically advise and help such customers to set up multiple PA services, i.e. one for each of their sites.  This usually improves printing performance.

It would be difficult to automate this customizing and tailoring process for Print Agents.

Another reason for manual installation & configuration is that different customers place their Print Agent services differently.  Some want it on the same host / VM as their mws instance.  Others want it on a separate VM.  Still others want PA service on remote servers (as described above). 

None of this proves why it must require a mouse. Automation isn’t just for laziness; it guarantees PROD deployments work exactly as they did in DEV and TEST. It ensures a process is repeatable. For a customer that has X branch offices, this requires an admin to perform these mouse clicks X times. What is far more expensive than this admin’s time is the risk that the steps aren’t done correctly.

Quality isn’t created by hope. It isn’t created by expecting a human to be careful. You can’t test it into existence. Quality is built into the process by reducing opportunities for error.

The fact that ifs-printagent-config.xml remains backwards compatible from 9 to Cloud suggests there’s a design intent for it to remain compatible going forward, too. Swapping out the software, uninstalling and reinstalling the services, and plugging in the old XML are all tasks that ought to be doable from the command line.