Salutation
on the Road...Charlie is only minutes from delivering the business presentation of a lifetime. He has traveled from his Portland office to corporate headquarters in Paramus for this pivotal career-changing event. He will be presenting to his company’s Board of Directors, detailing the business plan for his pet project—the Electronic Mousetrap. He has fretted over this presentation for weeks, fine-tuning the charts and tweaking the bullet points on a daily basis. Just this morning during breakfast at the hotel, he made several last minute adjustments to his spreadsheets based on new market projections that he received last night from his staff.
But now the moment has arrived. The time for tinkering has past. All that’s left to do is print out his charts and head for the meeting.
With his laptop in hand, Charlie makes his way to the hotel’s business center. He opens his laptop, loads his presentation, and brings up the print menu. He points the laptop’s infrared port at the business center’s complementary infrared port and selects from his computer’s print menu the option “Print 12 copies, collated and finished”. Moments later, the business center attendant hands Charlie the finished product; twelve color copies of his presentation, bound and stapled. Charlie rushes out the door, off to rule the world.
Both Charlie’s laptop computer and the hotel business center are Salutation-enabled. The following illustrates how salutation aided in the preparation of the presentation:
The laptop used the Salutation Protocol over the infrared network to find a printing device that met Charlie’s requirements. Since the presentation was in color, and Charlie wanted it ‘finished’ (collated, stapled, and bound), the Salutation protocol located a device meeting those characteristics—a high-end multifunction device.
Since Charlie was in a hurry, he relied on the Salutation Protocol to make sure that the selected multifunction device was actually available. He couldn’t waste time sending his high priority print job to a device that was being serviced, out of paper, or low on ink.
Even though Charlie had never used this device before, he knew the Salutation Protocol would be able to locate the appropriate driver for the selected printing device and load that driver onto his laptop (see Locating Device Drivers in the Tech Talk section).
To ensure that the laptop could operate the high-end functionality of the multifunction device, Salutation’s session management functions were brought into play. This common language provided the ability (among other things) for the laptop to start-job, end-job, suspend-job and check job status regardless of the device it had located. Additionally, if a common print language had been identified in step 1 above, Salutation could have stepped out of the way. For example, if the multifunction device supports Postscript, the laptop could generate and send a Postscript print image rather than using the Salutation session management protocols.
When the print job was completed, the laptop freed up disk storage space by automatically discarding the device driver since it was no longer needed.
