The following Illus. demonstrates the functional principle of the Management Center, central print server, and RD Session Host (or virtual desktops) with the example of the Helsinki branch:
Management Center
- After the printers have been set up on the ThinPrint gateway (box–01), the Management Center retrieves them with Get Configuration and writes them to its SQL database.
- With Apply Configuration, the Management Center creates the required printers and printer ports on the central print server (printserver–02), shares them and also installs any printer drivers needed. (It creates two printer objects per real printer = V-Layer.)
- A user starts a remote desktop session (on ts–01) from the thin client (helsinki–01).
data traffic of printer information (1), (2), remote desktop session (3), (4) and print jobs (5), (6)
AutoConnect
AutoConnect has two tables available for printer mapping:
Dynamic Printer Matrix
Map Additional Printers
In the Map Additional Printers table all printer shares are listed in the Target column. If all the other columns are marked with a star (*), then all the printers are mapped in a session – regardless of the presence, or not, of a ThinPrint Client.
By default, included in the mapping for the table Dynamic Printer Matrix, is the ThinPrint Client of the workstation from which the session is established. During this procedure, AutoConnect scans the print server for one share for each client printer:
- The AutoConnect installed on the RD Session Host (ts–01) asks the ThinPrint Client (on helsinki–01) about the printers to be mapped and then automatically establishes all connections intended for this workstation to printer shares on the central print server (see the following sections). Thus the printers appear in the session.
Printing
- If a user decides to print from an application, the data to be printed are transmitted to the central print server by means of the Output Gateway installed on the RD Session Host (in the printer driver-independent EMF format).
- There, the ThinPrint Engine renders the print job and sends it (in RAW format) to the ThinPrint gateway (box–01) with limited bandwidth, compressed, and encrypted if needed. The ThinPrint Client (on box–01) decompresses (and decrypts) the print data and sends them to the printer selected in the remote desktop session.