Internet Printing Protocol Standards now Available; Broadly Supported Printing Industry Effort Achieves Major Milestone.

Business Editors

PISCATAWAY, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 4, 2000

The Printer Working Group (PWG), a program of the IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization (IEEE-ISTO) and an alliance of key worldwide printing experts representing many printer and print server vendors, today announced that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has released RFC2911 (Internet Printing Protocol/1.1: Model and Semantics) and RFC2910 (Internet Printing Protocol/1.1: Encoding and Transport) as proposed standards. These documents are available at ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2910.txt and ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2911.txt.

The PWG has been instrumental in the progress of the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) by providing technical and logistical support and interoperability testing during the development of IPP. These new documents, in addition to the existing ones--RFC2568 (Rationale for the Structure of the Model and Protocol for the Internet Printing Protocol), RFC2567 (Design Goals for an Internet Printing Protocol), RFC2569 (Mapping between LPD and IPP Protocols) and RFC2639 (Internet Printing Protocol/1.0: Implementer's Guide)--define the core functions of IPP.

The IPP Working Group is continuing to develop new components that supplement and enhance the protocol. Currently, work is progressing in several areas, including an LDAP Schema, Job Progress Attributes, Operator and Administrative Operations, and several ways to receive notifications about job and printer events.

"IPP Version 1.1 represents literally thousands of man-hours of efforts by the network printing industry working together to define a common standard architecture and protocol for printing across the Internet and within corporate intranets, said Carl-Uno Manros, Chair of the IPP Working Group and Principal Engineer with Xerox. "By moving to a single printing protocol, significant savings in development and support for printing will help to continue to lower the cost of printing for all our customers."

During the week of October 16th, a PWG hosted "bake-off" will be held where multiple independently developed implementations of this new standard will be tested against one another. The results of this bake-off will not only verify the interoperability of these independently developed implementations, but will also be useful in determining the quality of the standard. Complete, well-written standards ensure ease of implementation. The previous two IPP bake-offs, held in 1998 and 1999, have been monumentally successful in demonstrating the quality of the standard and the implementations. Products supporting the IPP V1.0 are listed at http://www.pwg.org/ipp/IPP-Products.html. Some 30 vendors in the USA, Japan, and Europe have already implemented this version of IPP.

"The IPP project has been both a challenge and a key accomplishment for the network printing industry. Its success is indicative of the outstanding job that the IPP Working Group, under Carl-Uno's leadership, has done in creating and documenting the Internet Printing Protocol. Congratulations on this major milestone!" said Don Wright, Chair of the Printer Working Group and Lexmark International's Director of Alliances and Standards.

What is IPP?

The Internet Printing Protocol is a client/server protocol that allows the server to be either a separate print server or a printer with embedded networking and server capabilities. The focus of this effort is optimized for printers, but it could also be applied to other output devices. IPP is expected to revolutionize printing in the computer industry. It will provide a single standard interface for interrogating the capabilities and state of a printing system, submitting a print job, and monitoring the state of that print job. IPP will be quickly deployed to provide easy-to-use printing interfaces across a broad range of printing systems and operating systems that will inter-operate using the protocol.

History of the IPP Working Group

Chartered by the PWG, the IPP Working Group was formed in November 1996 and began developing necessary standards for print job submission and monitoring for the Internet based on early submissions by many different companies and individuals.

After a successful "Birds of a Feather" session at the December 1996 IETF meeting in San Jose, CA, a group was also chartered by the IETF on March 6, 1997. Representatives from Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Lexmark, Microsoft, Novell, Sharp, Sun Microsystems, and Xerox acted as chairs, authors, and editors for the IPP project. Internet drafts covering requirements, model and semantics, the protocol and other related areas of IPP have been submitted to the IETF and will continue to be revised as needed.

More information about the IPP group and specific technical details are available over the Internet in the following ways:

E-mail distribution list: [e-mail] Subscriptions: send "subscribe ipp" to [e-mail] Archive: ftp://ftp.pwg.org/pub/pwg/ipp/ Web-site: http://www.pwg.org/ipp

About the PWG

The Printer Working Group is a program of the IEEE-ISTO and an alliance among printer manufacturers, print server developers, operating system providers and print management application developers. Its charter is to make printers and the applications and operating systems supporting them, work together better. The PWG is open to any company or individual interested in developing these new printing standards. The PWG earlier developed the SNMP Printer MIB (RFC1759) and is currently working on both a Job Monitoring and a Finisher MIB; both are expected to be published jointly by the PWG and the IETF. The group meets regularly in person and on telephone conference calls. The next formal meeting of the IPP Working Group at a PWG meeting will be held in San Diego on December 6th and 7th, 2000.

Charter members of the PWG are Axis Communications AB, Canon, Inc., Corel Corporation, Eastman Kodak Company, Easy Software Products, Epson, Heidelberg Digital LLC, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Koki Imaging Solutions, IBM, i-data Printing Systems, Kyocera, Lexmark, Niigata Canotec Co, Inc., Northlake Software, Inc., QMS, Inc., Oak Technology, Qmaster Software Solutions, Inc., Sharp, Warp Nine Engineering, and Xerox. Other members are Bitstream, NetSilicon, Novell, Oc, Peerless, Ricoh, and Xeikon.