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.

“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.”

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.”