One bad printer setup creating havoc with other Commander jobs

Clay Whicker

• October 05, 2021 18:16

My company has been using Bartender for about 9 years and one of the most frustrating things that I have to deal with is that one printer issue often seems to make unrelated Commander jobs work inconsistently.

We have about 30 different tasks set up in Commander where files are dropped into folders on the server and then the task detects the new file and prints out a label.

I have found that if one of the printers has a bad driver or if a shared printer that is assigned to a task is no longer available, it affects other unrelated Commander tasks (the log may show that labels are printing just fine but in reality they are not actually printing).  Restarting Commander often fixes the issue for at least a little while but it will happen again eventually until you figure out what printer/driver/task is the issue.

So my question is, would upgrading to a new version of BT help with this specific issue?  We are still using the Enterprise Automation 10 SR4 version.

 

 

1

• 

  Xabier Clemente

  Moderator

  ★ BarTender Hero ★

  • October 11, 2021 08:20
  • Edited

  Hello Clay!
  
  Welcome to the BarTender Community!
  
  It is indeed probable that updating to BarTender 2021 will help with this particular issue. The current version of BarTender makes use of a new middleware tool called Integration Platform that replaces and enhances Commander.

  With the Integration Platform you've the possibility of:

  • Setting up an action that would check the status of the printer before sending the print job out.
  • Automatically redirecting a print job from one printer to the next (via the Administration Console app).
  • Logging detailed print job and integration information, which you can  then analyze in order to find root cause of an issue.
  • Profiting from its automatic management of BarTender print engines (based on workload and printing features).
  • Testing your integrations before deploying them, which helps to anticipate possible issues before they could appear in production.

  These are a few ideas which come to mind. I would recommend as well going through our Knowledge Base's documentation on Integration Builder and downloading our 30-day BarTender 2021 trial so you can test them on your own and make an informed decision. Also, here is a handy guide on Transitioning from Commander to Integration Builder.
  
  Finally, please be aware BarTender 2021 would need to run on newer Windows Operating Systems. You can check BarTender and Windows' version compatibility here to make sure you can run BarTender 2021 without any issues.
  
  Let us know what you think and enjoy the weekend!

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