The Printer Working Group (PWG) has added new capabilities to its widely adopted IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) industry standard embedded into almost all printers today.
The PWG’s IPP Everywhere allows computers and mobile devices to find printers and print without the use of vendor-specific software, or drivers, saving manufacturers, device makers and users time and money.
Updates to the IPP standard include:
- IPP Authentication Methods 1.0 provides practical implementation guidance for IPP printers authenticating IPP Clients (using for instance HTTP Digest, OAuth2) and how different authentication methods can affect the user experience on IPP client systems.
- IPP Job Extensions 2.0 defines the “media-col” Job Template attribute and extends the job management, monitoring, and processing capabilities of IPP, while deprecating or obsoleting some unused or unusable attributes.
- IPP Document Object 1.1 defines the IPP Document object and its associated attributes, values, group, and operations.
- PWG MFD Alerts 1.1 defines an update to the IANA-PRINTER-MIB (originally published in RFC 3805) to provide support for SNMP alerts in a multifunction device (MFD) and an equivalent update to IPP “printer-state-reasons” [STD92] and IPP “printer-alert” [PWG5100.9].
- PWG members include Apple Inc.; Brother Industries, Ltd.; Canon; Epson; Fuji Xerox; Google; High North, Inc.; HP; Intel; Konica Minolta; Kyocera; Lexmark; Meteor Network; Microsoft; Oki Printing Solutions; MPI Tech; Papercut Software; Qualcomm; Oki Data, Ricoh; Synaptics; Toshiba America Business Solutions; Tykodi Consulting Services LLC; Xerox and YSoft.
The PWG’s IPP Workgroup is working to add IPP systems services for IPP management, define IPP job and document encryption to provide IPP with end-to-end encryption, and revamp its enterprise printing extensions and production printing extensions to better support complex enterprise and press workflows. These updates are planned for release in 2020.
The IEEE ISTO Printer Working Group (PWG) is a programme of the IEEE Industry Standard and Technology Organization (ISTO) with members including printer and multi-function device manufacturers, print server developers, operating system providers, print management application developers, and industry experts.
Originally founded in 1991 as the Network Printing Alliance, the PWG is chartered to make printers, multi-function devices, and the applications and operating systems supporting them work together better. The PWG enjoys an open standards development process.
