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The Future of Workstation Printing


In my most recent Blog, I made the following statement:

LRS is looking at how to deal with the existence of WPP [Windows Protected Print] in the long run.

We have now done so, and the short answer is that we continue to steer the course that we have long promoted. Let me explain.

When we first introduced our VPSX product twenty years ago, we supported both incoming and outgoing methods for the Internet Print Protocol (IPP). IPP is an RFC-based protocol that goes way back to 1999 (RFC 2565 originally, RFC 8010 today) that updates the old LPR concepts created in UNIX in the very early days of open systems network printing. When VPSX was introduced, very few vendors were using this protocol. Early on, Michael Sweet introduced it into CUPS, so it was unique in those days to CUPS and VPSX.

Windows adopted IPP ports in Windows 2000, but very little printer hardware used it back in those days. Though adoption seemed slow, LRS continued to develop IPP mechanisms. TLS security was added. Many internal and API processes used IPP as the underlying communications method. The momentum was building.

Several years ago, Apple announced that macOS was not going to support their version of print drivers. Apple developed Apple AirPrint to be used instead. AirPrint limited the formats for printing to mostly PDF and insisted that IPP be used to transport the data and provide finishing options like duplex, tray, stapling and others. Printers had to be certified by Apple for AirPrint in order to receive this data.

Microsoft Universal Print requires that jobs be XPS or PDF as well and also uses IPP for transport and finishing options. You can see from this that even though there are IPP standards, multiple paths have been taken, and these are not necessarily compatible. 

This is where the Mopria Alliance comes in. The Mopria Alliance was formed by several printer vendors in 2013 to standardize printing and scanning given the rising prevalence of mobile device printing. The print technology became prevalent in Android with Android 8, but also, as a result, became more standardized and available in printers. Today, only Mopria-certified devices can be used by a workstation or server when WPP is in play.

So, let’s review: LRS receives print data via IPP. LRS can transform common formats to nearly any data stream. LRS can either send to any printer or install agents on many MFPs that can pull the jobs from LRS. There is only a small gap to overcome, that of Mopria compliance.

As such, I am pleased to announce that LRS has officially joined the Mopria Alliance to bridge that gap. We expect to have a WPP compliant solution available in the first half of next year – well before the 2027 deadlines. For those of you that use LRS solutions in the AirPrint environment, please remember that we are also AirPrint certified.

These measures are just par for the course for LRS. Remember that we were doing network printing even before LPR/LPD was written. LRS has been changing with the times in network printing since the early 1980s. Technology evolves, standards evolve, and our solution set evolves right along with them. This is just the latest step in a long history that demonstrates LRS leadership when it comes to delivering any document in any format — from any application or platform — to any printer or other destination.