Universal PDF Printing on Sun Secure Global Desktop

For those of you who are not familiar with SSGD, SSGD is an application-publishing software, enables the users from any platforms of desktop to access application on any platform of server. Applications all run on server and then published to the client via a web-browser. I’ll talk about the details later, but for now on, let’s stick to the definition :).

I’m doing a POC work on one of our customer for Sun Secure Global Deskop (SSGD). The customer uses Windows 2003 Server as the application server that hosts the application, and Windows XP as the client. Now the problem is, the customer wants to print from SSGD to his network printer installed at the client. The problem is, he doesn’t want to install the printer driver on the application server.

Since all the applications run on the server, while printers are connected to the clients, then the print job from the apps server must be sent via SSGD server to the client printer. Now, what do we do if we don’t have any printer driver installed on the server and we don’t even want to install anything on the server ?

There are a few options :

• Uses printer driver mapping

This one is tricky. It’s basically said that we use printer driver installed by default on Windows 2003 server as a replacement to the printer installed on the client. Haven’t done this yet, need to explore

• Uses Universal PDF printing

The simplest way is to use Universal PDF printing. It works basically like this :

1. The print job from the application server is printed to PostScript (PS) format using one the PS printer installed by default in the application server
2. The PS data then sent from application server to SSGD server. SSGD will convert this job into PDF file using ps2pdf utility installed on the SSGD server (this required GhostScript to be installed on the SSGD server)
3. The PDF from SSGD server is then sent to the default printer on the client. This requires some sort of PDF reader on the client side.

Since PDF viewer/reader is basically a standard on desktop nowadays, configuring Universal PDF printer is very straightforward. All I need to do is configure Universal PDF printer as default printer on the SSGD server, and it all works like charm :).