Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Companies looking for a more reliable method for sending OS/400 print jobs to PC-attached printers over TCP/IP may want to consider the latest offering from Brooks Internet Software. Last week the company issued a new release of its Remote Print Manager 9X, for MicrosoftWindows 95/98/Me PCs, that includes a rebuilt print engine, a new resource status window, and a new automatic error recovery feature that steps in and rescues print jobs when Windows starts to misbehave.

Brooks Internet Software started developing its line of TCP/IP network printing products in 1995, at about the time that LANs and WANs started to become viable alternatives to older network standards. It was the intention of the company to replace some of the control and quality-of-service features that companies lost when they started replacing their expensive direct-attach SNA infrastructure with cheaper and faster IP-based networks. The emergence of LANs also gave rise to an abundance of printers for which there were no drivers written for older platforms such as the AS/400. Today, thousands companies, governmental agencies, and schools are using the Idaho Falls, Idaho, company's three print engine products--RPM Elite, RPM Select, and RPM 9X--to allow employees to print OS/400, mainframe, Unix, Linux, and Windows jobs on their locally attached or networked Windows printers.

The entire RPM product line enables print jobs originating on hosts to be executed on any printer for which there is a Windows print driver available by using Line Printer Daemon (LPD) printer queue to "listen" for print jobs sent from a Line Printer Requester (LPR) device, such as an OS/400 server and many others that use LPR. The RPM line supports three different queue types that give users flexible output options. These include: a text queue, which gives the user control over some formatting options, such as font, margins, collation, and other settings; a raw queue, which facilitates straight-through processing and preserves the jobs' original formatting; and a filter queue, which is used for archiving or integrating the print jobs with third-party applications.

The RPM product line has other benefits in addition to allowing OS/400 shops to print OS/400 output on Windows printers that would normally be unavailable to them. For starters, if a user wanted to print only three pages from an 88-page OS/400 report, they could use an RPM product to select which pages they want to print, instead of printing the entire report, which IP-based printing would require the user to do otherwise. Users will no longer use their precious OS/400 CPWs to convert SNA Character Stream (SCS) or EBCDIC data into ASCI formats, because the RPM products do that for them. The software provides other niceties, such as converting ASA Carriage Control commands to PCL or PDF-compatible commands, and stripping out extraneous PCL formatting for printing through standard Windows drivers.

With RPM 9X 2.5, Brooks Internet has improved its entry-level print server for Windows 95/98/Me PCs. The software's resource scheduler print engine has been redesigned to be faster and use Windows resources more efficiently. Brooks Internet has also fixed a situation that caused the software to suspend a print queue when there was an error with the Windows resource. Now, RPM 9X 2.5 will automatically resume processing when the error is resolved, reducing time spent administering queues, Brooks Internet says. A new display status window has also been added that shows the user how the software is using Windows resources.

Brooks Internet has also announced new releases of its RPM software for Windows NT/2000/XP-based workstations and servers, RPM Select and RPM Elite. Earlier in 2002, Brooks Internet started shipping the 4.5 releases of these two products, which included an improved GUI (and a Web GUI for RPM Elite), new remote administration features, and new file handling capabilities. The core difference between RPM Elite and RPM Select is RPM Select supports 24 printers, while RPM Elite can be connected to up to 99 different printers. RPM Elite can also be integrated into third-party applications through a COM interface.

Pricing for RPM 9X 2.5 starts at $115 per seat for commercial businesses, $69 for governmental agencies, and $58 for educational institutions. Pricing for RPM Select starts at $298 per seat for businesses, $179 for government, and $149 for schools. Pricing for RPM Elite starts at $598 per seat for businesses, $498 for government, and $398 for schools. For more information, visit the company online at www.brooksnet.com.