Hi Martin,
I faced a similar situation at a client site and after actually trying out Option 1, then considering the cost of Option 2 (resources, skill sets and long-term maintenance), we decided to go for Option 3.
With Option 1, we used the lpr queue commands to send the reports to particular printers (print queues) on the that were registered on the AIX box. We faced two major problems with this approach.
(1) We had what we called the 'default' printer problem, where, may be based on the volume of pages we were printing or the performance issues on the server itself, print jobs would go the default print queue on the AIX server. As you can imagine, that was not good. Jobs that were intended for one department were ending up in another, and the default location had to start parsing through the print outs and create piles. Operational nightware.
(2) Cover sheets... We had 1 report (basically a form) that needed to be printed with data for different departments (six depts). So a developer wrote a little java app that called BusinessObjects and passed in the report parameters - and ID, and the printer name. The problem that we faced was that the print jobs would come out the other end, each with its own cover sheet. Even though we passed in the AIX command to suppress the cover sheet, they came out. I don't remember whether specifying the switch in the CMC worked or not - but we didn't have that luxury - we had to do programmatically because the printing was so dynamic.
So we opted for a rather simple situation, which was made possible also because the customer's license allowed it. We installed the report job servers (no CMS) on a windows servers, assigned them to the CMS pool on the AIX server, installed the printers we needed on the Win server. Then we created a Server group that included just the Windows servers (report processing servers), and locked the report in question to only be processed by servers in that group. So the report would only be processed by the Windows servers with the necessary printers.
The solution has been in operation for over 12 months and working great. We can manage all the servers from the CMC and with auditing turned on, we have great visibly on the performance of the system. Because this printing system is so critical, the process is being enhanced by throwing the stats on an Xcelsius dashboard for real-time monitoring by the operations folks.
Hope this helps. I'll be glad to share more if you're interested.
Will
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