Senior Project - SPORK

IBM is a multinational corporation specializing in many areas of business. IBM's Printing Systems Division (PSD) specializes in the creation and management of high speed, high output printers. In addition to creating print hardware, PSD also creates software to manage these printers and the associated print networks.

InfoPrint Spooler is one of PSD's newest print server applications. InfoPrint Spooler uses Java and DB2 so that the application is platform independent. Along with this platform independence PSD desired a more accessible and user friendly interface for InfoPrint Spooler. The current user interface for InfoPrint Spooler was also a Java-based application. Although very functional, this user interface still required the user to be at the physical location of the print server to operate. In addition, this user interface did not provide a graphical representation of the print network as a whole.

This project solves these problems. It provides a web-based graphical user interface for InfoPrint Spooler. In addition to providing a graphical user interface, the system also employs a topological view of the print network. This view is easier to understand and provides more information to the user at a glance. The system also incorporates new features, such as the ability to "ping" specific printers. This allows the software to be used for both the creation of print networks as well as monitoring the "health" of the network, allowing multiple job types to be performed from within the same user interface.