Disaster Recovery

Disaster Recovery

The Challenge: Resolve Printer and Inserter Codes Incompatibilities

Disasters do happen. They need not be monstrous like Katrina, but offices get flooded or burned down and computer systems, printers and inserters get ruined beyond repair. And even if you have preserved your software offsite, you are surely going to be faced with serious outsourcing problems in the replacement production environment. Consider the following scenarios.

Your print center has been knocked out. You have found a print shop, to which you can outsource the printing of your documents. The problem is, your print applications have been written for AFP printers and the new print shop has Xerox and PostScript printers, rendering your DR plan useless
The Xerox printers, which hold all of the current print resources are all down, keeping you from printing anything
The inserters in your DR production center use inserter codes different than the ones on your documents, forcing you to wait for your mail room to come back on line, before you can mail the company invoices

These holes often appear in DR plans when a disaster strikes. What can you do to solve, or better still, forestall those problems?

The Solution: Put PRO Suite Products in Your Disaster Recovery Kit

Crawford Technologies has the components and expertise in print management that can help you solve major problems in an emergency. People often come to us after the disaster has struck and we are usually able to help them out, but it is far better to allow us to help you out with your plan ahead of time.

Crawford Technologies products facilitate Disaster Recovery, conversion, offloading and resource management for print applications in Xerox metacode, LCDS, AFP, PostScript, PDF, PCL or HTML print stream formats. Our software products run under z/OS, OS/390 and MVS, Solaris, AIX, Linux, HP-UX and Windows systems.

Printer Applications Incompatibility

When the new site has printers that are not compatible with your print applications, you need a way to faithfully convert your print data and resources to a format the new printers can handle.

CrawfordTech print stream transforms, unsurpassed in the industry, provide total flexibility, allowing clients to simply run the print file through the appropriate PRO transform to convert, on the fly, print commands and resources to the target printer's format.

You can convert from and to any of the following print streams formats: Xerox metacode, LCDS, AFP, PostScript, PDF and PCL.

Resource Acquisition and Replacement

When a disaster occurs and you need to move your print data to a different site, you also need to ensure that the current versions of your print resources are used to print the data without overwriting the new site’s resources. Resource management is a core strength of PRO products. These products can ensure that your current fonts, forms, logos, images, etc. are embedded in your print applications in Xerox metacode and LCDS, AFP, PostScript or PCL print stream formats.

PRO JES ACIF/Automate Product

PRO JES ACIF Automate can be used to:

Automate Disaster Recovery printing processes
Automate outsourcing of AFP print applications

The IBM AFP Conversion and Indexing Facility (ACIF) provides a very useful program for indexing print files, preparing print files for inter-system transmission, and gathering print resources used by print files. However, ACIF usage requires JCL changes in the applications that need to be used with it. The PRO JES ACIF/Automate product automates the use of ACIF by selecting output from the JES queue and processing it through ACIF. The PRO JES ACIF Automate product makes it easy for data centers to convert many applications without the need to modify application JCL procedures. When run as a Started Task, the program can be controlled with MVS operator commands.

Inserter Codes Incompatibility

If the inserter codes on your documents are incompatible with the inserters at the new site, the PRO Suite includes the PRO Document Enhancer plug-in that can remove the old inserter codes and add the new codes, allowing your mail applications to be up and running quickly

For more information see the Document Reengineering solution.

Users of CrawfordTech Disaster Recovery solutions include service bureaus, financial institutions and communication, courier, utilities and high volume production mail environments.