During Jan 2003, ITSC upgraded all our existing print servers to Windows 2000 platform. Other than retaining existing capabilities, the new printing environment also provides Internet Printing mechanism via Internet Printing Protocol (IPP).
Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) means a mechanism to print documents over Internet. This mechanism facilitates greater printing flexibility by providing emerging standard for network printing.
Internet Printing Protocol is designed to become a universal standard for printing. By adopting IPP, ITSC has laid a state-of-art infrastructure that can leverage next generation of network printing.
What IPP can finally help is to integrate all the printing implementation among different operating environments, like Unix, Linux, Mac, Windows ...etc. Features, like remote administration, security support (secure communication, authentication and authorization), print accounting service, have been put into the wish list for IPP's future development. (see RFC 2567)
Our current implementation is based on Microsoft Windows 2000's Internet Printing features which adopts IPP standard v1.0 with Microsoft's own extension. IPP standard version 1.1 has been released and more features on the wish list are anticipating to be released in future.
ITSC will keep a close eye on this trend and extend this service to users of broader community should the new technology becomes available.
Previously, notebook Windows 2000/XP users will find it difficult in accessing network printers since their machines cannot be joint to our Windows 2000 domain.
Now, with IPP, they can readily connect to campus printers and print documents at any access points.
The new service is now ready. Installation procedures and further detailed information for IPP can be found via