Novell is leading the effort to define Internet Printing Protocol (IPP), which is a new standard for submitting and managing print jobs over intranets and the Internet. IPP was initially developed through the collaborative efforts of Novell, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Xerox. Other printer and software vendors that participated in these efforts include Adobe, Canon, Dataproducts, Dazel, Digital, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Kyocera, Lexmark, Microsoft, Netscape, QMS, Ricoh, Sharp, and Tektronix.
This group of vendors, called the IPP working group, met earlier this year during the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meetings held in Munich, Germany. The IPP working group is now finalizing their documentation, which defines the IPP printing model, protocol specification, security mapping, and directory schema for printers. The IPP working group is concurrently finalizing documents that describe things such as the rationale for IPP and its gateway implications.
The IPP working group will ask the IETF to issue a last call for comments prior to the next IETF meeting, which will be held this December in Washington, D.C. At this meeting, the IPP working group will submit the finalized documentation for IPP. The IETF can then issue this documentation as a proposed standard.
As you might expect, NDPS is well-suited for supporting IPP. Novell will add this support as soon as IPP is adopted as a standard. When NDPS supports IPP, users won't have to waste time first printing and then faxing documents to remote locations. Instead, these users will use a World-Wide Web browser to find and install an NDPS intranet or Internet printer, each of which will be identified with a uniform resource locator (URL).
With NDPS as the print services behind IPP, users will select the printers they want to use, and NDPS will automatically download the necessary printer drivers to the users' workstation. An NDPS implementation of IPP will further enhance this standard by notifying users (by way of a pop-up screen, a log file, an e-mail message, or a third-party notification method) when a print job is completed.