Knowledgebase: Jargon Buster

Use these outlines to keep abreast of the latest technological innovations and concepts:

Pull Printing

1. Pull-Printing is a print methodology where users:
2. Submit their print documents to a central print queue
3. Walk up, any time later, to any pull-print enabled printer
4. Identify themselves using a magnetic card or user code
5. Initiate the Pull the document from the central queue to the chosen printer
   

Document Management

Document Management , in general, is the automated cont rol of elect ronic document s through their entire life cycle, from creating to archiving. Document types can be: bitmap images, HTML, SGML, PDF, graphics, spreadsheets, word process documents, et c. Document management allows organisations to exert cont rol over the product ion, storage, management and distribut ion of such electronic documents; yielding efficiencies in the ability to reuse and share information and to control the flow of documents.

Document Management Systems (DMS)

The term Document Management System signifies a broad collect ion of related systems that per form one or more of several funct ions. DMS are systems that coordinate elect ronic document management. Often a DMS is seen as an applicat ion that allows elect ronic documents to be stored, intelligently retrieved and shared. Most DMS allows indexing or meta data to be linked to documents; version control/tracking to be applied; Web publishing; etc Typical DMS are: Microsoft Sharepoint , Documentum, IBM Content Manager , FileNet , Lotus Notes/Domino, PC DOCS, CMS, etc.

Clustering

Computer clustering s early architect G. Pfister defined a cluster as "a parallel or dist ributed system that consists of a collection of interconnected whole computers that is utilized as a single, unified computing resource."

The collect ion of several server computers into a single unified cluster makes it possible to share a comput ing load without users or administ rators needing to know that more than one server is involved. For example, if any resource in the server cluster fails the cluster as a whole can cont inue to offer service to users by using a resource on one of the other servers in the cluster,
regardless of whether the failed component is a hardware or software resource.

In other words, when a resource fails, users connected to the server cluster may experience temporarily degraded performance, but do not completely lose access to the service. As more processing power is needed, administ rators can add new resources in a rolling upgrade process. The cluster as a whole remains online and available to users during the process, while the post -
upgrade performance of the cluster improves.

The Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edit ion, and Windows Server, 2003 Datacenter Edit ion operating systems support clustering, as does HP s Tru64 Unix / TruCluster software.

More information on clustering can be found at:
HP:
http://h30097.www3.hp.com/cluster/
Microsoft:
http://microsoft.com/ntserver/ProductInfo/clustering/clustering_faq.asp