The operation and administration of a state university requires a high degree
of versatility in printing capabilities. A print solution running in such an
environment must be extremely reliable and flexible to satisfy demanding printing
requirements, tight production windows and strict delivery deadlines. Solimar
Systems interviewed the head of Central Computing Services at one of the largest
and most prestigious schools in the California university system to discuss
their implementation of the Solimar® Print/Director system.
The university's Central Computing Services organization is charged with printing
a wide variety of internal documents that are generated with administrative
data processing applications, including general ledger, employee payroll and
student registration. When the administration of this educational bellwether
was not satisfied with the pace of document distribution or the flexibility
of their mainframe printing systems, they turned to the analysts of Xerox for
a new printing solution. The answer was to trust a proven partnership: Xerox
production printers and the Solimar Print/Director print solution.
"It frees up our 4850s to do more large volume work, rather than print a bunch of small jobs that programmers would necessarily print on the 4850s."
Central Computing Services Manager
California State University
"Originally, what we were looking for was to print large volume data
from anywhere on campus to our 4850s," says the Central Computing Services'
manager, who presented the issue to Xerox representatives. The Central Computing
Services now uses the Solimar Print/Director to connect the mainframe to the
network, enabling any authorized user to print Windows-based PCL applications
on the 4850 LPS printers. In addition, Solimar's XCHANGE™ modules ingest
EBCDIC, DJDEs and Metacode from the mainframe and convert the data streams and
resources to PCL and PostScript. Print/Director then routes the jobs to distributed
network printers across the campus. "It frees up our 4850s to do more large
volume work, rather than print a bunch of small jobs that programmers would
necessarily print on the 4850s."
"XCHANGE now allows the various users to receive their input almost instantaneously, where before they had to wait for a delivery service."
Central Computing Services Manager
California State University
The Central Computing Services is also realizing savings in their production
costs, "One of the things we were able to do is get rid of a fairly costly
older midrange printer," says the manager. "We've been able to replace
it with a much less costly printer and still be able to do many of the same
things, which is to print Xerox forms on it through the Solimar software. This
is easily accomplished with no deterioration in print quality."
