Load Balancing and Printer Failover increases the efficiency and availablity of your Print Sub system.

If you are using a Windows Print Server you have the option to utilize Windows Printer Pooling but there are limitations to this. In Windows printer pooling you have one queue looking at multiple printers and the balancing is pretty random always favoring one printer.

Software Shelf has 12 years of experience with the Windows Print Sub system, developing and providing solutions for thousands of different scenarios. Load Balancing and Printer Failover with Print Queue Manager gives you better control options to keep things running in tip top shape. Rather than having one queue looking at multiple printers you have one queue for each printer. On the initial shared queue you place a rule when to redirect jobs to another print queue, the alternate print queue does not even have to be shared. Then on the second queue you also place a rule when to move jobs to a third queue (or even back to the original queue).

These rules can be by total byte amount already being processed by the queue or by total jobs already in the queue. For example:

Queue 1 – Rule to move jobs to Queue 2 if Queue 1 already has 10 jobs in the queue. Can also be done in byte count being handled by the queue.
Queue 2 – Rule to move jobs to Queue 3 if Queue 2 already has 10 jobs in the queue.
Queue 3 – Rule to move jobs that end up here back to Queue 4 if Queue 3 is already handling 10 jobs.
So on and so forth.

This also works very well with Print Manager Plus to give you a complete Print Management solution.

There are other benefits to running this as you can also have Queue 1 redirect jobs to the next queue if the printer goes offline for any reason. Paper Jam, Toner Out, Drawer open, out of paper, etc. Jobs will move on down the line t the next printer and print.

You can also have pop up messages sent back to the end user letting them know their job has moved and where to, and pop up alerts sent to an admin. These pop ups do not rely on Net send like most other applications so you don’t even have to enable the messenger service to have all this happen.

Print Queue Manager:
http://www.softwareshelf.com/products/print_queue_manager.htm

Print Manager Plus:
http://www.softwareshelf.com/products/print_manager_plus_enterprise.htm