jump to navigation

Legacy Print Streams – There are solutions! October 10, 2008

Posted by Julian Bradder in Uncategorized.
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
add a comment

In order to establish smooth and effective operations, simplicity is the key. Whilst in this blog we have talked about the utopian document factory, the reality is that in order to achieve that utopia, we need to start from a greenfield position or, have endless amounts of cash and time to buy our way out of legacy.

One of the key striking points for legacy is in the print stream. This is the print file that a document composition engine would generate. It may also be generated by older legacy business applications.

Analysis of these legacy applications may bring business justification to migrate a certain percentage to a newly installed document composition platform. However, it is unlikely that every single print stream can justify this migration.

Therefore, we have built a document factory, with big investment in high speed printers that for the sake of argument come from IBM. Therefore, the print stream is probably AFP.

The problem is that we have 10 applications coming from an old Windows platform that is outputing PCL. What can we do about this?

Companies such as Emtex, Levi Ray & Shoup and others all offer technology known as Print Stream Transformation. Through this technology a file can be converted from a Type A to a Type B. This technology is pretty good and pretty reliable these days. The main thing to plan for is the extra processing time to do this conversion. Don’t understimate this as processing 500k documents in this fashion can take a considerable chunk of processing and server time and this may be competing with other jobs which may have a higher priority.

This area may be one of the more challenging problems that you face in the development of your automated document factory. There is much that can be done to ease this transition. Be creative in your approach to legacy document migration and remember that a new document migration may mean the engagement of yet another company business team!