[Cloud] Analysis of Cloud Printing use-cases

[Cloud] Analysis of Cloud Printing use-cases

Michael Sweet msweet at apple.com
Wed Apr 27 20:22:05 UTC 2011


On Apr 26, 2011, at 10:10 PM, Randy Turner wrote:
> My summary analysis of the use-cases (so far) is that the bulk of these use-cases are not "compelling" enough to utilize cloud services.  And one or more of these use-cases seem somewhat contrived.  From my perspective, any time the client wants to print to local ("on the same network") printing services, Cloud printing is really not needed.  There are too many ad-hoc/guest printing services that can achieve this functionality, and these methods are far less complex than erecting a cloud printing service to do this.

Yes, I agree this is normally the case.  However, there are also cases where local Wi-Fi and wired networks are not available - all you have is a cellular network. In this case, you won't have direct access to the printer and will need to go through some intermediary (in "the Cloud").

That said, we are bunching all of these use cases together since there is at least some intersection with IPP Everywhere. Better to hash them all out and then divvy them up between the two projects.

> ...
> The way I see Cloud Imaging, the more the "source" of an imaging job is isolated from the "destination" for the imaging job, the more value a Cloud Imaging Provider can offer. By "isolated", I mean that the client knows little or nothing about the destination of the print job (isolated in knowledge), and nothing about "where" the destination is (isolated "geographically")

This gets to the crux of the problem: proximity.  We have yet to spend any amount of time on it (despite it being in our slide decks for the last 3 face-to-face meetings), but I will make sure proximity is one of the topics for the Use Case BOF.

Proximity can describe the relationship between Client and Printer in terms of physical location/distance, organizational availability/access/policy, and network topology, access, and speed.

For example, while Cloud Imaging might seem useless for local printing in a business, it could also provide the necessary infrastructure to provide regulatory compliance - all devices can register/authenticate with the Cloud Imaging Provider, which then handles logging, auditing, allowed routing (OK to email a copy of a patient's chart to a specialist), etc.  The details of implementation in the Provider are (thankfully) out-of-scope, but I think we'll find that Cloud-based infrastructure will replace traditional SSO solutions due to the relative ease of cross-platform integration - that's organizational proximity.

Similarly, the cellular network example (above) is a case of proximity defined by the network topology.

________________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer, PWG Chair






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