How Print Wizard saved $$$ for a local hospital
by James Chin

As we have stated before, there is more to Print Wizard than meets the eye. Here is one example of how Print Wizard is being utilized.

A particular hospital approached us with a dilemma that they needed solved immediately. And Print Wizard came to the rescue. This particular hospital was printing 3-part UB-92 and UB-04 forms at the rate of thousands a day on an old host-based impact line printer. Then suddenly this printer failed.

The hospital took this opportunity to look for alternate solutions, and needed that solution quickly put into place.

The IT department found us on the web, called for tech support, and within a day, we had scanned their original UB forms, created PCL overlays and set up Print Wizard Server Edition with two "listen" services on a PC hooked to a large capacity laser printer. The first service prints 3 copies for each passed print job and apply the UB-92 form overlay and the second "listen" service prints 3 copies of the print job with the UB-04 overlay. And at the end of each job, the printer staples the 3 part forms together for distribution.

The hospital is now doing several thousand print jobs a day, with 12 different form overlays and there are no more pre-printed forms to order. They claim to be saving almost $500.00 per month from one copy of Print Wizard Server Edition.

Sample PCL copies of both the UB-92 and the UB-04 forms are available on our web site in the download area. Check out the following:

http://www.anzio.com/pub/printwiz-samples/

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Print Wizard Manifests
by Bobby Ezell

Starting with Print Wizard version 3.0.50, from within the user interface you can now set up Print Wizard Manifests. These are files with an extension of ".manifest" and includes a list of files and wildcards that will always be printed together.

A manifest is nothing more than a list of files that will be printed as if each file name were typed in on the command line for the Print Wizard engine. Theses can be fully qualified file names or a wildcard to be expanded when their turn comes up for printing.

So when would you use a manifest file? Check out a couple of real world uses from our customers:

"Our application drops a print file called invoice.txt into a PC directory. Our application then runs Print Wizard against this file and references a second, manifest, file that prints a cover page, followed by the invoice, followed by a disclaimer form. These are all printed for each invoice file before passing them onto our printer and proceeding on to the next invoice."

"A Print Wizard service despools from a shared directory, watching for a file coming down from the host. When the file shows up, the service prints the file along with a manifest file containing a list of CAD attachments in PDF form. All files are printed and then packaged up for a customer."

Issues to be aware of

• The order of files in the list is only somewhat critical. At present, we do not order or link print jobs together. If you are printing files that are Print Wizard related, these will be processed in order. However, if some of the files require "smart printing", the various file association applications may print these out of order.

• All lines in a manifest are handled as file names and may require complete path names. This also means all these files will be handled identically, depending on the command-line settings, the profile referenced, etc. If you are faxing or emailing these, they may get handled as individual faxes and emails, depending on your configuration and fax engine and email server settings.

The future

The future has many enhancements slated for manifests.

Print job chaining
Print job chaining (keeping all print jobs in order even if they come from various Smart Print sources).

PDF combining
Combining all the files in a manifest into one PDF.

Parameter inclusion
The inclusion of parameters after the file name to alter how each file print behaves.

Fax job chaining
Manifest files as single fax job (this would group all files into a single file to fax).

Emailing in one step
Grouping all manifest files as a list of attachments in a single email.

Scripting
Scripting how the output should behave if files exist or don't exist and pulling select data from the files themselves (such as a fax number or email address).

Automated manifests
If you print a file and a related file with a .manifest extension is found, that manifest will also be printed, i.e. you print file abc.txt and Print Wizard also does abc.manifest.

So there is more to come in future releases. Let us know if you have specific needs. Giving us feedback on your needs always helps us prioritize future development.

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Print Wizard Server Edition running on a server
by Bobby Ezell

Print Wizard server edition, as the name indicates, is ideally suited to run from a Windows server, be it a dedicated print server or a file server. However there are some cautions that should be followed when running from a server. There are also some security issues that need to be considered when setting up Print Wizard Server Edition.

Common Issues

These can affect all Print Wizard services on the file server:

• If a service does not print where you anticipate, or print at all, it is possible that the user the service is running as does not have the specific printer defined, or has no printers defined. Most printer setup procedures will install for all users, but some do not. Also if the printer is installed by a restricted or limited-permissions user, that printer may not be available to the service user. Try changing the service user inside the Administrative Tools : Services management tool to run as a different user.
   
• All disk access for remote drives, be it temporary or a watched directory, should be the fully qualified network name and not reference a mapped drive. The user a service runs as does not usually have access to mapped drives.
   
• Email and fax software should be granted all user access in order to perform properly from Print Wizard.
   
• Remember that the later the version of Windows software running on the server, the more tightly locked down are the security issues, i.e. Windows 2003 requires more attention to make sure everything works than does 2000, than does NT.

Despooling

The most popular uses of Print Wizard services is to despool files from a common "drop" location where any number of applications can drop print files. These files may come from a local directory, a shared directory or a network storage unit, and the files may be placed the manually (drag and drop), by a Windows server application or even from a Linux or UNIX host application sharing this directory.

However, there are a few item that may cause problems that you should be aware of:

• Print Wizard Server Edition should always be ran from a local drive with at least write access to some temporary directory.
   
• The despool service "directory to watch" should not point to a mapped drive. Instead you can point to the fully qualified network name for that shared drive instead, i.e. //SERVER1/DESPOOL_DIR/ or //IP_ADDRESS/DESPOOL_DIR/
   
• The despool service needs write permissions to not only the despool directory, but also to a temporary location. Otherwise it may go into a loop printing the same file over and over. By default it will use the user's temporary directory for work files that the despool service is running as. You can specify a different directory in the service setup.
   
• If you are running the service as the default user and things do not seem to be despooling, make sure that the default user, usually "Local System" has access to the network device or the spool directory, and that it has proper permissions.

"Listen", "FtpDespool" and "LPD" services

The most common problems with these services are all security related:

• For the user this service runs as, the user must have at least write permissions to some temporary directory that is referenced by the service.
   
• Firewall settings will block "listen" and "lpd" by default. You will need to either permit the "pwservices" application to run (put it on your exceptions list) or you will need to open up the network port these services use. Likewise with FTPDespool, from a file server, FTP outbound may also be blocked by the firewall.

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