1. Core Concepts

With the latest generation of Intuitive for Print Management dashboards, there has been a fundamental change in how solutions are developed and maintained.

Previously, all Print Management solutions were independently maintained and developed pipelines. This has presented a challenge over time, as while we scale out our portfolio into Print Management solutions, it presents a problem with maintenance and development of existing solutions.

Therefore, this meant a redesign of how we approach Print Management, with a view to reapproaching solutions as whole.

The method, which you’ll learn about in this course, relies on existing practises we’ve previously used for our Multi-Tenanted applications for Parent and Child connections.

This previous practice relates primarily to our integrations into PaperCut Hive and SAFEQ Cloud. With those stacks, it's been a Master Connection to that specific Print software's demonstration data, with a Child connection (i.e. the part that overrides the Master) to that customers' Print Management implementation.

With this development, this has meant developing a sole SQLite Print Management dashboard stack, which by design, allows other Print Management sources to take precedent where a user has been assigned. Meaning, that a single set of dashboards can be supplied to a single destination, but with multiple different Connections that can present the Print Management data of that source. E.g. Maintaining one Intuitive server, with multiple different logins for a SAFEQ6 Connection, a PaperCut Hive connection, a Toshiba e-FOLLOW Cloud connection – and so on. Previously, this would have been several sets of dashboards, all achieving the same visual output, but all distinct pipelines for maintenance and upgrades.

With all that said and done, this in itself presents a problem. All the Print Management applications are completely different solutions! Each Print Management vendor will have its own method of exporting data, even for different products under the same Vendor. For example, PaperCut MF exports data via CSV, whereas its Cloud product PaperCut Hive exports data through their API.

Naturally, this entails different data structures for each Print Management application which then forms our problem. How can we display Print Management data universally when we’re being fed different data points?

The solution is to utilise Views within SQL Server. These Views are pre-programmed SQL statements that are tailored for each Print Management solution, but arrange the data in such a way that we have the same number of data points (fields), the same name / alias, to the same data type (e.g. dates, numbers, strings).

Of course, unlike other BI solutions we have premade this for you.

The Views themselves are by design reconfigurable, as that is one of their main talking points. A frequent piece of feedback we’ve had is that each customers’ Print Management application has been configured completely different to each other. To borrow a phrase, each Print Managment software installation has its own “Quirks and Features”.

Take for example a University on PaperCut MF. Previously, our dashboards would have aggregated data by Department. In the Universities' case, this would have meant only seeing the two Departments of "Faculty" and "Student". Instead, customers such as this wish to showcase data by the Shared Account Name – i.e. where they’re charging the printing to.

Utilising Views allows customers like this University to instead populate certain fields with the most useful data point. It allows a greater flexibility of showcasing Customer data, but tailoring it to the Universal design of the Intuitive for Print Management dashboards.

Fear not - you’ll learn more about altering the View in each respective Print Management course.

To recap, we’ve effectively split out the Connection to the Print Management source from the main Dashboard stack. This means, as we support more integrations into this set of Print Management designs, each new integration harnesses the power of the development of everything before it.

This also applies to translations – to which you’ll again learn more about later – where one set of translations is not bound to that particular solution, it’s available to all of the solutions of Intuitive for Print Management.

Next Module - SQLite Connection