MS Office 2010 delays listing status of iPrint printer

  • 7009731
  • 11-Nov-2011
  • 09-Oct-2012

Environment

Novell iPrint for Linux
Novell iPrint Client for Windows

Situation

Microsoft Office 2010 is non-responsive for 10+ seconds when accessing the printer dialogue when an iPrint printer is assigned as the default printer.

Resolution

Apply the novell-iprint-server RPM from mid-2012 or later. 

Additional Information

This delay occurs when print jobs are queued up at the printer agent spooling location on the iPrint server.  Common reasons for print jobs being queued up at the printer agent hosted on the Novell server are:

  • 3rd party printing accounting software is configured with iPrint and print jobs are held be default so they can be manually released for printing.
  • The printer is in error state.  The print jobs can be sent to the printer agent, but cannot be forwarded to the network printer, causing jobs to be stacked up.
  • The printer agent hosted on the Novell server is in a "Pause Output" state.  Print jobs can be submitted to the printer agent, but are held there by request of the administrator pausing the output.
When jobs are queued up in this manner, the iPrint server code takes time to return the printer status.  The novell-iprnt-server code released mid-2012 was changed to more efficiently return the printer agent status in this scenario. 
 
The type of request sent by the workstation is different when using Microsoft Office 2010.  The delay does not occur with other applications (as far as we know).