i5/OS and OS/400

Route documents intelligently
Request ad hoc reports
Design professional-looking business output
Consolidate enterprise printing
Deliver customer documents via e-mail
Integrate Web images into iSeries output
Intranet electronic delivery
Increase shipping productivity
Deploy business-class printing

Scenario: Order entry has been re-engineered to the Web. However, the back end of the order process, the order confirmation, is still printed and mailed in hardcopy.

Requirement: Customer wants to automatically segment order confirmations, retrieve e-mail data, and send them immediately to customers.

Advanced Requirement: Need to define/profile multi-channel delivery on a customer/document basis.

Solution: With Intelligent Routing, if the input spooled file contains group tags, you can segment the print file at group boundaries and distribute each segment in any combination of these ways:

• Spool it to an output queue as PDF.
• Store it as a stream file in the integrated file system.
• Send it as e-mail.
• Re-spool it as AFP™ (for print, fax, or other operation).

In addition, you can instruct the Intelligent Routing function to take multiple actions on a given file or segment. For example, you can define one segment for which a customer/user wants a copy emailed and another copy printed. Each segment can be treated differently.

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Scenario: One of your key customers called to ask for a recap of his company's orders for the past month. The data exists on a section of the monthly sales report by customer.

Requirement: Be able to select that customer's data and e-mail the information immediately.

Solution: With iSeries version 5, release 2, both iSeries Navigator and iSeries Access for the Web provide for access to PDF and e-mail functions and enable electronic presentation or delivery of the information. The customer's sales data resides on pages 21 to 50 of the sales report, so you simply override the print file attributes to select this page range, then specify the PDF options with iSeries Navigator.

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Scenario: Your current output — statements, invoices, reports — is inadequate.

Requirement: Improve the content, appearance and effectiveness of your communications and accomplish this in a productive, non-disruptive manner.

Solution: Infoprint® Designer for iSeries provides a fully graphical design system that is fully integrated with iSeries output architecture and fully application independent. With Infoprint Designer, you can quickly and easily transform business documents, then leverage the possibilities of PDF and e-mail.

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Scenario: You have an ERP application that generates data in PCL format. Over time, you have acquired numerous network print applications and a large number of desktop personal printers.

Requirement: Consolidate printing to take advantage of the speed, power and throughput of your high-speed iSeries system printer — along with the ability to use IPDS™ error recovery.

Solution: Infoprint Server contains ASCII transform capabilities that can change PCL, Postscript and PDF print jobs into the native page format of the iSeries (AFP), then consolidate these jobs on a high-speed, cost-effective, integrated iSeries printer such as the Infoprint 2090ES/2105ES. This step enables you to apply the efficiencies and reliability of iSeries-integrated printing to save money and improve service.

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Scenario: Your order entry process, formerly a batch application, has been re-engineered to the Web to allow customers to enter orders directly. However, the order confirmation is still printed and mailed in hardcopy.

Requirement: Automatically segment order confirmations, retrieve e-mail data and send confirmations to customer immediately.

Solution: Electronic segmentation support in the iSeries server and Infoprint Server can delineate each customer's order confirmation. This step triggers separate PDF files to be created for each customer. Using the user exit, you can retrieve the customer number from the document on the fly and use it to look up the e-mail ID in the customer master database. The ID is passed back to PDF/e-mail processing, and the e-mail is on its way to the customer. Alternatively, with some Web programming, you can produce the order confirmation and pass it back to the customer's browser, with an automatic invocation of Adobe Acrobat to display the confirmation.

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Scenario: As a manufacturer, you have an engineering drawing application on Windows® that creates drawings in JPEG format. In fact, as you deploy more Web applications, you use images in other Web formats such as GIF and TIFF.

Requirement: The Web images should be on the work orders that are produced by the iSeries.

Solution: Infoprint Server will process the iSeries architecture to directly embed ASCII image data (GIF, JPEG, TIFF). There are also batch transforms available to convert GIF, TIFF, and JPEG to iSeries page segments.

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Scenario: Your company creates standard business documents and reports that contain images, overlays and typographic fonts. The documents are AFP-based and need to contain the external resources for reviewing and printing.

Requirement: Take advantage of your company's Intranet to distribute the documents electronically using AFP, which is the standard data stream within iSeries for graphical pages.

Solution: Infoprint Server provides for portable or Web AFP with a command in version 5 called Create AFP Data, which allows the external resources to be present when AFP is sent to another system or browser. AFP architecture structures each page by a combination of application data and references to external page resources such as overlays, images and fonts. AFP plug-ins for Internet Explorer and Netscape permit viewing of Web AFP files.

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Scenario: Your distribution company ships a high volume of packages via UPS, and it's critical that the shipments are delivered quickly and correctly.

Requirement: Your company would like to generate and use the two-dimensional Maxicode bar code that UPS has developed. The Maxicode encodes all of the pertinent information associated with the shipment.

Solution: Support for Maxicode is available in DDS and in IPDS printers for these symbologies. You can specify 2-D bar codes with a DDS keyword. In the near future, 2-D support is planned for Infoprint Designer. 2-D bar codes can store up to 4000 characters of data, compared to 10 to 12 characters (the product ID) in a UPC bar code. Because all of the data associated with the parcel remains right at hand, shipments can be processed faster and more accurately. While Maxicode is the fastest growing 2-D bar code, others such as PDF417 and Datamatrix are also widely used. PDF417 has been adopted by the Department of Defense and many state motor vehicle departments.

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Scenario: Your company's print volume has steadily increased as operations expanded. PCL printers originally intended for the network worked as iSeries business printers at low volumes. With higher volume printing, the PCL printers can't keep up with user demands for speed and reliability.

Requirement: Deploy a printing solution that is designed for mission-critical business printing instead of low-volume personal printing.

Solution: Intelligent Printer Data Stream™ (IPDS) print manager for iSeries supports an interactive dialog between your iSeries and IPDS printers to ensure that each page is rendered completely and accurately. IPDS, which is designed for system-managed business printing, provides full error detection and recovery and can scale to the highest printing speeds.