Overview

Introduction

OrderFlow is a enterprise strength web-based order processing and warehouse management system. While OrderFlow can be hosted within the customer’s warehouse environment, it is more typically hosted by a dedicated hosting provider, often in a cloud environment.

The warehouse environment needs to support printing. Items that need to be printed may include despatch notes, labels and picking reports.

A key feature of printing operations is that local network access is required. Software that connects to either a local or network printer needs to be running on the warehouse’s local network.

The OrderFlow software architecture reflects this requirement in an number of ways:

• More complex printing requirements, such as bulk printing, and integration with third party courier label printing software, is supported through a dedicated application, know as the Print Server. The print server is a robust Java-based application designed to run on the warehouse local network specifically to handle printing tasks on behalf of OrderFlow.
• Simple printing requirements can be met using a Java applet embedded within OrderFlow pages. For example, the packing screen can support direct hands free printing using a Java applet.
• Direct printing of PDF documents is also supported through Adobe Reader.

In varying degrees, all of these mechanism of printing require some setup. The purpose of this document is to describe the steps involved for setting up and maintaining a printing environment which uses each of the above tools. The target audience for this document includes technical support teams working for customers of Realtime Despatch Software.