HP UPD - System Administrator's Guide HP UPD 5.6.5

4. Test and evaluation
5. Roll out to production
Initiation and planning
To gain the maximum benefit from the HP UPD, it is important to:
●
Fully understand your printing requirements and environment.
●
Develop an HP UPD deployment strategy.
An HP UPD deployment requires major changes to your IT environment and should be treated accordingly.
Make sure you back up your print servers and print queues before beginning any installation.
Understand your printing requirements and environment
Determine deployment objectives
This is a description of the objectives of the deployment. The intent is to get a clear and detailed picture of
what the end result will be after the migration or upgrade. See
HP UPD deployment worksheet on page 213
for details
Print servers or Direct IP
With improvements in desktop computing power, available printing management tools, and the growing
concerns about reducing printing management costs, some enterprise customers are starting to question
whether they should move to Direct IP printing or continue with client-server printing.
For additional information on whether direct IP printing is right for you please refer to Direct IP Printing with
the HP Universal Print Driver available on
www.hp.com/go/upd. HP UPD supports either environment.
Identify stakeholders
The stakeholders are anyone impacted by the plan, and can include, but are not limited to the following
groups.
●
End users – Will there be downtime, what will change?
●
IT staff – How much time and resources?
●
Help Desk – What do they need to know?
Make an inventory
You must inventory all printing products, print servers, print queue names, printer drivers, IP Addresses, and
page description languages (PDLs) that you are using. If you have print servers, you also need to determine if
all of the print queues are still active.
Consider PDL needs
Some business applications rely on a specific version of Printer Command Language (PCL) or require Adobe®
PostScript®. As a result, test that the applications you are using are compatible with the HP UPD versions of
PCL and postscript emulation. If your testing proves that some applications are not compatible with the
12 Chapter 3 Plan an HP UPD deployment ENWW