Replacing InfoPrint Manager with Levi, Ray & Shoup solutions
In 2007, IBM’s printing division joined forces with Ricoh, a well-known hardware vendor. Over the next three years, IBM’s core InfoPrint Manager (IPM) product for printing AFP and other print data formats, along with numerous developers, were fully integrated into the Ricoh organization. A key goal was to expand Ricoh’s product portfolio to enable AFP and SAP printing on all printers. Today, InfoPrint Manager is available for AIX and Linux as well as Windows.
LRS customers often report problems with the performance and reliability of Windows Print Servers and other third-party print server products. Often, these problems arise because the customer is trying to stretch the product’s scalability beyond its architectural limits. Said another way, customers do not always select “the right horse for the course.”
In the case of Ricoh’s InfoPrint Manager product, it performs very well in production printing environments where it can effectively manage several high-speed production printers (for example, printing large jobs with millions of bank statements or utility bills). However, some customers report that the product’s performance suffers in highly-distributed printing environments, where there is a requirement to efficiently deliver large numbers of small print jobs to thousands of distributed printers across the enterprise. Problems can arise when customers attempt to use a single InfoPrint Manager server to support a large number of distributed printers.
In these situations, LRS helps customers to replace InfoPrint Manager and other point solutions with a highly-scalable output management solution that provides assured delivery of application output across thousands (or tens of thousands) of distributed printers. Customers can take full advantage of centralized management and control, regardless of the number of print jobs or printers.
LRS products extend today’s AFP printing environment by supporting the latest enhancements to the AFP architecture, including container objects. LRS also offers full SAP integration using SAPGOF(U), enabling the delivery of application output to printers as well as softcopy destinations like email, SharePoint, content management systems, etc.
Such migration projects are generally smooth, due to key capabilities of the LRS solution. These include the ability to transmit feedback to sending applications via a standard SAP BC-XOM interface and leverage MQ Series and other messaging services. LRS software features full Unicode support and full SAP barcode support without the need for extra hardware. It also enables organizations to replace costly IPDS printers with lower-cost PCL devices.
LRS has over 35 years of experience in mainframe printing and open-systems print server software, and recent independent research highlights the significant cost savings that companies can realize through reduced administration costs and better problem determination/resolution capabilities. How much savings? AKH Vienna, one of the largest hospitals in Europe, replaced InfoPrint Manager in 2009 and saves 50,000 Euros per year by using a centralized LRS solution.
The LRS technical team has a wealth of expertise and experience in working with SAP, mainframe, Unix/Linux and other environments. We can enable the transformation and migration of many different document formats, page description languages and print/document related software products found in large organizations. Our software is specifically designed to simplify decentralized printing and our technical experts can simplify the process of implementing our solutions in your organization.