INTELLIscribe: Third Party Integration

One of our goals for all our products is for them to be part of a 3rd party solution where that makes sense for the customer. We feel it is a better solution for everyone if the vendors cooperate, so we plan for that upfront. Our INTELLIscribe product primarily acts as a Windows port monitor, taking your fully processed Windows print job and sending it to one or more printers on your network. Typically this is completely user-driven; when you print from your Windows application, INTELLIscribe kicks in and does its work.

However, we’ve also added integration possibilities to INTELLIscribe. If your third-party application generates data that you’d like to pass through INTELLIscribe, perhaps to send to multiple printers or do load balancing, you can use our ISendFile utility. ISendFile is provided with INTELLIscribe. The executable ISendFile.exe is found in the install folder. We recommend using a full path to call it, for example:

"C:\Program Files\Brooks Internet Software\INTELLIscribe\ISendFile.exe"

If you call the program with “--help”, ISendFile will print its own options and exit. We use the typical UNIX convention of the “-h” switch telling you what the real help option is; that way you don’t have to remember if it’s -h or --help.

Here’s a real world example. Let’s say you have a queue definition in INTELLIscribe; let’s call it “pool_1”. You’ve created a list of printer addresses in this pool and given that list the policy of fail over. You can send your data files directly to that pool using INTELLIscribe with this command line:

(path to INTELLIscribe install folder)\isendfile pool_1 datafile.prn

where “datafile.prn” is your print ready data file. This will spool the file to INTELLIscribe and manage sending that file to one of the printers defined in your pool_1 queue, just as if you had printed it from a Windows application.