The Solution
It was determined that if we could direct the Cerner print stream to the Secure Print queue then there was a ‘one too many relationship’. This would mean users could print from Cerner but release on any MFD within their fleet, negating the requirement for Cerner to build a specific queue for each printer and allowing for a larger rationalisation to the fleet. Often the challenge with integrating host systems to Windows-based print streams is that user accounts do not match i.e. the user account details in Cerner would be different to that of the same user in Windows (Active Directory).
For instance, the user ‘John Smith’ may login to Windows as ‘jsmith’ (and therefore be known by the same name within the print solution), but when he logs into Cerner the user account could be ‘john.smith’. This means that even if the print stream was directed from Cerner to Windows, the job would be considered to belong to a different account than the ‘jsmith’ Windows user.
The Trust’s staff use their Smart Cards plugged into the keyboard to access the Cerner applications. Upon investigation, we found the Smart Card number appeared within the PJL header of the print job when the user sent the job to print. We could then extract this unique reference and add it as an alias to the ‘jsmith’ account within the print management solution, thereby trying the two ‘users’ together as one. This ensured that the solution was up and running by the time the infrastructure was in place. As a further addition we wrote a custom secure Web Service to allow users to pre ‘self-register’ their Cerner card details with the print management solution.
