You're at a friend's place surfing or working on a document. You need a printout but there's no printer around. Normally you'd have to save what you want on a floppy and wait till you get to your printer at home.
But there's another way to do this. With Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) you can print pages remotely. Give your print commands from a computer at one location to a printer at another, just by using the Net.
So what is IPP?
It's another way of delivering print jobs from a machine to a printer or print server. IPP was an initiative flagged off by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 1996 to promote a universal standard for printing on the Internet - a single protocol that would be implemented by most printer vendors.
IPP is supported by vendors like Xerox, HP, Canon, Epson and companies like Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Sun and a number of others who have integrated it into their products and hardware - printers, print servers and operating systems.
To ensure that online printing is platform independent and to maintain consistency, IPP uses the existing standard of HTTP to 'communicate' a print job to the printer in a similar way that browsers use HTTP (every URL has an http://, for IPP you would type ipp://) to call information from a Web server.
How does it work?
Printers usually need to be connected to a stand-alone computer or a computer/ server connected to a Local Area Network (LAN). But connecting a printer to a machine or a server uses up CPU power of a machine thus slowing it down. IPP is a more efficient way to do this.
The Internet itself is a huge network and to print over the Net, your printer would also need to be connected via an IP address. You need:
- An IPP-enabled printer at the location you want to print
- For older models that don't include IPP support you need a print server, like this. Different types of print servers are available from companies like HP, Epson IBM, etc.
- A dedicated TCP/IP address for your printer.
- A DSL, Cable Modem, leased line or ISDN with a static IP address for your PC or Mac. If you don't have a static IP address, check with your ISP and ask whether you can have it and how much an additional IP address will cost.
- An operating system that supports IPP (Windows 2000 and later systems support it). Microsoft also has an upgrade for Windows 95 and 98 that adds IPP support.
To print from the Net or connect to the print server, just type in the URL of the printer, the same way you would the URL of a site. This would load a page where you'd be able to view the printer permissions, print queue status and give in a print job. It would also indicate whether the machine you're using needs a printer driver for IPP, with a link to download and install the driver.
PC Mag has a more detailed note on the process.
This is just one aspect of IPP. There are also software applications like InterPrint and PrinterOn Printwhere that let you configure your email account to print important messages directly without having to access email and print manually.
IPP is 'tamper proof'. Additionally, Secure Socket Layers (SSL) can be added to encrypt documents and authentication can protect access to the network. Printer permissions can also be set to allow only certain people access. Software like PDF Transit also makes Internet printing easy and secure.
What are the uses?
There are several uses of IPP. You can share a friend's printer over the Net or print to your office or home. Mobile users can even print on the move, courtesy devices like Blackberry that support Internet printing. You could also send across documents (ones that don't need signatures) to business associates anywhere in the world by printing directly onto the printers on location, without having to email them as attachments, which would mean someone having to open them and take printouts. IPP also eliminates the high cost of long distance fax charges..
IPP will also enable a new class of Internet-based printing services like VistaPrint where you can design cards with different layouts and backgrounds online and print it directly on their high quality printer. Or, you could print to a printing centre and have the copies delivered to your doorstep.
IIP has open source versions called IPP 1.0 and 1.1 for Unix and Linux systems, available free at cups.org.
Presently, though support exists for IPP in terms of printers, print servers and bandwidth, very few people or organisations are aware of this technology. The Printer Working Group (PWG) estimates that with the increase of more vendor support and awareness, IPP should take off.