Before you can add printers to the Sentinel system, you must decide which mode of printing the system is going to use. You may deploy a combination of the following modes; they are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
One or more virtual printers (e.g., B/W, color) are defined on the network. All the users send their print jobs to one of these printers. The user may then go and "pull" their printout from any printer throughout the organization (that matches the print type), wherever they personally enter their ID code.
Each workstation that uses this mode must be configured to use the virtual printer. This is done only once, as part of the system's initial setup. Printer settings are not managed at the level of the workstation.
The advantage is that all workstations can use the same printer settings, no matter where the users collect their printout.
Useful for large print jobs and special users such as managers. The user has one printer driver for each printer. The user has permissions for automatic release or manual release using the web-based Sentinel management interface.
In virtual printing mode the user has only one printer driver per printer type. The physical printer that prints the job is the user's default printer, defined by the administrator in the Sentinel management interface.
One advantage of this system is that if a printer is temporarily out of service, the user simply walks to another printer and pulls the job from there.