Schedule Your Batch Printing

If printing large volumes of documents with SilentPrint has caused one or more of your printers to become unusable by others, it may be time to consider scheduled batch printing.

Scheduling your batch printing after office hours or during lunch periods will allow others in your organisation to use printers without having to wait for your documents to complete. Furthermore, scheduling will help prevent third-party documents being printed amongst your own.

By using the Windows Scheduled Tasks application (installed with Windows by default), you can schedule when SilentPrint performs its batch printing. For example, if your office closes at 17:00, you could schedule SilentPrint to start printing the jobs in its Watched folders at this time. If your organisation’s lunch period is between 12:00 and 14:00, you could schedule SilentPrint to perform its printing between these hours.

There are several ways in which you can configure the Windows Scheduled Tasks application and SilentPrint to schedule printing…

• Launch SilentPrint when batch printing needs to start, and exit SilentPrint to stop the printing process; or
  
• With SilentPrint already launched and suspended, resume when printing needs to start, and suspend again when printing needs to stop.

Both methods require you to use a combination of SilentPrint’s command line parameters…

/Suspend
/Resume
/Exit

Command line parameters are appended to the SilentPrint command line instruction. When prompted in Windows Scheduled Tasks for the application you wish to run, enter the following…

"C:\Program Files\SilentPrint V2\silentprintv2.exe" /command

Where /command is the name of the SilentPrint action you wish to perform.

NOTE: The path referenced above is where SilentPrint is installed by default. If you specified your own path during the installation of SilentPrint, use that instead. If you are using SilentPrint Pro or Server, substitute silentprintv2.exe with silentprintproserver.exe.

In the following example, SilentPrint Office/Office PLUS has been scheduled to launch at 12:00, suspend at 14:00, resume at 17:00 and exit at 18:00 every day.

The following command line instructions were used in this process…

SilentPrint LAUNCH
"C:\Program Files\SilentPrint V2\silentprintv2.exe"

SilentPrint SUSPEND
"C:\Program Files\SilentPrint V2\silentprintv2.exe" /suspend

SilentPrint RESUME
"C:\Program Files\SilentPrint V2\silentprintv2.exe" /resume

SilentPrint EXIT
"C:\Program Files\SilentPrint V2\silentprintv2.exe" /exit

As you can see, by using Windows Scheduled Tasks and the SilentPrint command line parameters, you can quickly and easily determine when your batch printing starts and stops.

For instruction about configuring Windows Scheduled Tasks, please refer to your Windows documentation or help.

Further details about SilentPrint command line parameters can be found in the Getting Started section of the SilentPrint user guide.

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