How to print thousands of personalized documents over the web

Question

I need to generate thousands of personalized letters from more than 800 workstations in diverse locations.

While we had only a dozen of customers per location, we used Crystal Reports over the web and its PDF/Word export function to produce multi-page document for print. With thousand of customers this just doen't work for the following reasons:

• Browser unable to reliably download huge report
• Server resourses insufficient to handle simultanious requests from several workstations
• Even if Server and Client are Ok, you cannot start printing until whole reort is downloaded (i.e. for hours)

Workstations only have browsers and local high perfromance printers at the moment.

What is the solution for this problem? How should I do this?

Answer 1

foo at bar dot baz

Answer 2

In the past, we had a similar challenge. To solve it, we created a C# application which was installed at each location. It would communicate with the server via web services to get the data it needed to print.

Then we used the native printing functionality built into .NET for the actual printing. The downloads were quick, and it could handle high volume printing.

Answer 3

Since the question was clarified as:

Remote warehouse only has browser and printer. It connects to the server and enters information about the item that just arrived. In responce to that, printing of thousands of shipping labels should start, warehouse cannot wait until labels are printed elswhere and delivered to its location.

...the rational way to do this would be to make all the printers network printers. The workstations could share them using Windows networking, or pick your own favourite print server technology.

The web application needs to be told which printer needs the labels. It then prints to whichever print server is appropriate.

The alternative - download the document and print locally - is too user-driven to be appropriate in my opinion.