You may also wish to ask for printing recommendations on the VSE-L list. I'm guessing that your customer has a 6262-014 or 6262-022 printer. Those are channel-attached line printers (using band printer technology). One immediate question is what sort of printed output does your customer want? (Or indeed, do they want printed output at all? Do they want to "print," forward, and archive output electronically, using PDFs for example?)
Anyway, here are several options -- and there may be others depending on the answer(s) to those questions. In no particular order: 1. You can still find 6262 printers available on the secondary market. If your customer loves their 6262, that might be an option. 2. The InfoPrint Solutions Company has some channel-attached printers available for sale. Nowadays channel-attached printers tend to be very high speed and probably overkill in this case. But if your customer is looking for a serious upgrade in print speed, you can get more information here: http://www.infoprintsolutionscompany.com The models 3000, 4000, and 4100 support channel attachment. Océ also offers some channel-attached printers (e.g. their Pagestream 154 model), and perhaps other companies do as well. 3. You didn't mention if your customer has the CSI/IBM TCP/IP for VSE or the Barnard TCP/IP for VSE product. (There are at least two TCP/IP implementations for VSE.) If the former, a standard base function available is AUTOLPR. AUTOLPR can automatically route POWER queue jobs to any standard network printer or print queue that supports LPD-style network printing. (That's pretty much everything.) On its own your customer won't get complex printer transforms -- AUTOLPR is really for basic line printing -- but it should get the job done in terms of output formatting similar to what the 6262 printer provided. (This assumes that you're sending the output to a printer that accepts relatively straightforward line printing. Most do, such as PCL laser printers and typical dot matrix printers.) And you can also customize AUTOLPR fairly well, to add cover pages for example. You can find more information on AUTOLPR in the IBM TCP/IP for VSE V1.5 User's Guide here: http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/epubs/pdf/iestpu01.pdf There is also a direct analog to AUTOLPR called AUTOEMAIL. AUTOEMAIL takes the output and e-mails it, which is the most basic form of electronic output distribution. 4. PSF/VSE (5686-040) is available from IBM, of course. 5. CSI offers a product called GPS (General Print Server): http://www.tcpip4vse.com/products/zvse/GPS/GPS.htm This product intercepts 3287 printer output (VTAM), formats it, and routes it via HP JetDirect (IP sockets protocol) or LPR/LPD protocol to a network-attached printer. GPS is an optional feature for CSI/IBM TCP/IP for VSE. If your customer has CSI/IBM TCP/IP for VSE, your customer can license GPS either from IBM or CSI. 6. Thigpen Enterprises (via Barnard Software) offers VSE2PDF: http://www.vse2pdf.com This product converts VSE print jobs into PDF files, then (typically) e-mails them to recipients. It is a somewhat more advanced form of electronic output distribution than AUTOEMAIL. There are some other options as well, but I'll stop there for now pending more questions and information. I hope this information is helpful. - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan / Asia-Pacific E-Mail: timothy.sipp...@us.ibm.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
