[MFD] Some random thoughts about the Cloud Imaging (Control?) Service

[MFD] Some random thoughts about the Cloud Imaging (Control?) Service

Michael Sweet msweet at apple.com
Tue Apr 30 11:57:36 UTC 2013


All,

At yesterday's conference call we talked about the Cloud Imaging Service as a front-end or "meta" service that provided a coherent view of all MFD services registered with a Cloud Imaging Manager/Imaging Device.  This service necessarily would need to be able to report all of the service endpoints, names, and types so that a Client or Cloud Imaging Manager would know which services were provided/registered and where, very much like the SM System Control Service.

I've been thinking some more about that and I think the Cloud Imaging Service *is* basically a SM System Control Service with additions to support the interface with the Cloud Imaging Manager.  There are several advantages to this approach:

1. A System Control Service provides operations for creating new services, providing a way for us to define registration of new Cloud Imaging Managers/Imaging Devices with the Cloud Provider, something that we had previously tabled as out-of-scope.  IMHO, this makes for a much more compelling model that has a chance of basic interoperability from the initial configuration of the Imaging Device.

2. A System Control Service provides a common interface for Clients to enumerate the available services they are interested in, vs. using a different interface depending on whether Cloud or local devices were being accessed.

3. A System Control Service provides a view of all subunits managed by its services; this opens up some interesting managed service options that would otherwise need to be handled through other, proprietary means

4. A System Control Service would allow us to address remote management of Imaging Devices (vs. services), although I believe we should still keep this out-of-scope for the 1.0 document.

In addition to the Cloud Imaging Manager operations, there are a number of additions I think we should make to the existing SM interface as well, which would affect *all* SM services:

1. Provide a way to get Imaging Device specific elements; in IPPSIX this is the new Get-Output-Device-Attributes, which returns the Printer attributes associated with a given device UUID - this is the converse of the Set-Output-Device-Attributes operation that is sent by the Manager to update/set the current configuration/capabilities of the device.

2. Add elements to enumerate the Imaging Devices associated with a service; for IPPSIX I just added parallel attributes called device-uuid, device-uuid-assigned, and device-uuid-supported.

3. Add elements to the Job and Document status groups that show the state on the Imaging Device assigned to that Job or Document. In IPPSIX these are the output-device-document-state, output-device-document-state-message, output-device-document-state-reasons, output-device-job-state, output-device-job-state-message, and output-device-job-state-reasons attributes.

All of the new Imaging Device elements and operations would probably remain optional for non-Cloud usage (implementations/administrators get to choose whether this information is exposed, just as in SM 1.0), but for Cloud I think we have to expose it in order to support the Cloud Imaging Service - Cloud Imaging Manager interface.

Finally, if the Cloud Imaging Service *is* a superset of the SM System Control Service, it might make sense to change the name to Cloud Imaging Control Service.  That would express the hierarchy and heritage in (hopefully) a less confusing way:


    Client ------->  Cloud Imaging Control Service
       |              |
       +---------->   +------ Cloud Print Service -\
       |              +------ Cloud FaxOut Service -+<----- Cloud Imaging Manager
       \              +------ Cloud Scan Service --/
        \             |
         \            +------ Cloud Print Service -\
          \------->   +------ Cloud FaxOut Service -+<----- Cloud Imaging Manager
                      +------ Cloud Scan Service --/
                      |
                     ...
                      |
                      +------ Cloud Print Service -\
                      +------ Cloud FaxOut Service -+<----- Cloud Imaging Manager
                      +------ Cloud Scan Service --/

Thoughts?

_________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer, PWG Chair


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