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The print services protocols provide mechanisms for managing and gaining access to print services in a distributed environment. Using print services protocols, clients can print to or obtain printer drivers from servers. The Print Services Protocols Overview [MS-PRSOD] describes the print services that support the use and management of a distributed print infrastructure. The print services protocols are listed in [MS-PRSOD] section 2.2. The Fax Server and Client Remote Protocol is specified in [MS-FAX].
Printers are often shared among multiple print clients using a print server. Printers are represented as print queues that are located on print servers. A print client has one or more connections to print queues that are shared by one or more print servers, which comprise a simple hub-spoke server-client model. The Print Services protocols enable a large number of users to print to a small number of printers, enables an administrator to enforce which printers can be used by users and when they can be used, and automates the process of installing and updating necessary printer drivers on numerous computers that send jobs to remote printers.
The print services protocols can be deployed within a domain-based network or in a home or workgroup environment. For Windows implementations, each print client can also act as a print server and share locally connected printers with other print clients.
The standard protocols used by the print services protocols are described in [MS-PRSOD] section 2.1.4.
The Fax Server and Client Remote Protocol enables communication between a client system and a fax server. Its use is completely distinct from use of the printing-related protocols, although both are RPC-based. Although a single shared fax driver appears locally in the user interface on a client system (enumerated as a printer driver), no protocols described in [MS-PRSOD] are used to interact with that driver or to support any fax usage scenario. The fax printer driver uses only the Fax Server and Client Remote Protocol to transfer faxes from the client to a fax server, without relying on any print services protocols.
The primary components described by the fax services are client-based components for composing fax documents, which includes the ability to select and edit fax cover pages, server-based components for queuing, routing, transmitting, and archiving fax documents, as well as a fax console used to configure the fax server using protocol methods specified in [MS-FAX]. The fax functionality embodied in the shared fax driver on a client wraps the fax job in an RPC-based wrapper and then forwards the job, using RPC interfaces, to the RPC Interface Module of the fax server, and then to the outgoing fax queue.
The fax queues on a fax server [MS-FAX] provide different capabilities than print queues [MS-PRSOD], although both are called "queues". A fax server has a single outgoing queue of faxes awaiting transmission. The fax server's outbound routing module dynamically determines, based on rules installed by default or configured from the fax console, which fax device or device group to use to transmit each fax job stored in the single outgoing queue. A print server has multiple print queues associated with multiple devices.
A fax server also has a single incoming queue that holds received faxes that have not yet been delivered to their final destinations. The fax server uses inbound fax routing extensions to process received faxes and deliver them to their destinations. Of three standard fax routing extensions, one extension delivers a fax to a printer by making local API calls to the print services.
Fax queues use only the TIFF data format to store sent and received fax jobs; however, fax queues also use a variety of queue data formats (.FQP, .FQE, .FQR, .FQT) defined by fax services to support routing and transmission of fax jobs. To print an inbound fax, the fax services use local print spooler API calls and printer drivers to send the fax to a print queue in a manner identical to that of other printing applications. The TIFF data format is converted locally to a print system-specific data format.