On This Page
- Print and Output Management Process Overview
- Print and Output Management: A Business Perspective
- Print and Output Development Activities
- Print and Output Configuration Activities
- Print and Output Delivery Activities
- Print and Output Maintenance and Support Activities
- Print and Output Management Standards and Standardization Activities
Print and Output Management Process Overview
What is output? For the purposes of this document, output is defined as the transformation of data to a format designed for viewing. Examples include the generation of simple American Standard for Information Interchange (ASCII) or Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) characters and control codes for an impact printer, creation of printer control language (PCL) output for a laser printer, and generation of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) data to be viewed in a browser.
People commonly think of this output as human-readable (for example, documents). However, barcodes, intended for machines, and optical character recognition (OCR) and magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) output, intended for both humans and machines, also certainly fall into the broad category of “output.”
To these lists of different formats and intended uses, add the concepts of delivery, reliability and security to get a sense of
Note: Although output refers to both documents and other forms of output (described above), the primary emphasis of the process described in this paper is on printed documents; therefore the term document is used extensively, although in most cases the activity, task, or concept being described will apply equally to other forms of output as well. Non-printed forms of output will be touched on only briefly in this paper.
The management of output encompasses all the activities that cause output to be delivered to a destination in the appropriate format and with the desired speed. Given this, the activities that encompass a print and output management process fall into three categories:
- Development activities that result in the creation of output
- Configuration activities designed to prepare the environment for the delivery of output
- Operational activities designed to maintain the flow of output
In developing the print and output management infrastructure, it is useful to generalize many business applications in terms of the document(s) produced. Creating a common process workflow enables the sharing of tasks and resources across multiple applications.