software for printing electronic documents

Harmoni costs USD 12,500 per server processor, with a minimum order of two server processors -- a great value and a significant cost savings over alternatives. Customers have an extended right to copy Dynalivery's client libraries, without accounting to Dynalivery for the number of authorized users or copies. Dynalivery's straight forward license for Harmoni requires unique license numbers for all non-production and production server deployments and recognizes no distinction between their terms. Harmoni is designed to run on dual and quad Intel-architecture servers. Reseller and OEM inquiries are welcome.

Cost

4) Document technical support issues in writing in sufficient detail and with non-confidential data so that Dynalivery can independently reproduce any errors that you may experience. If errors occur on servers which have previously worked, be sure to document anything that has changed in your computing environment, including OS patches, database upgrades, or network changes -- by the project team or supporting colleagues.

3) Establish dedicated and separate development, test, production systems and stick to a firm policy for advance, comprehensive testing before application and document templates (reports) are promoted.

2) Review your project plans in advance and periodically with Dynalivery, including the schedule and requirements to interface with all other software products. Provide Dynalivery with a quarterly report of all open technical issues and track our mutual progress on them.

1) Assign committed people to work with Dynalivery who are experienced developers, knowledgeable in their print engine of choice (Word, Crystal, etc.), Harmoni programming interfaces for the web/portal server or programming tools of their choice (WebSphere, WebLogic, JBoss, C#/.NET, etc.), networks, the database of choice, and the business area for the project.

Based on Dynalivery's experience supporting worldwide customers since 1998 with the predecessor to Harmoni, Parallel Crystal, a number of best practices have emerged which may help customers undertake projects with a minimum of risk. Here are the "best" of the best practices:

Best Practices

While Visual Basic-style automation of printing may be inexpensive, what happens in mission-critical applications if it fails? Harmoni's load balancing service also includes automatic failover. Dynalivery recommends that its customers primarily deploy Harmoni on clusters of two or more dual processor servers. In the rare case when one of the Harmoni servers fails, all jobs failover to the remaining server(s), providing customers with time to make repairs, without interruption of service. Also note that this configuration promotes fast and consistent response times by preventing a few long jobs from blocking a majority of short jobs.

Reliable printing

Harmoni solves this dilemma by enabling users to direct their print requests through configurable queues for high, medium, and low priority jobs, at any time. For example, customers may request on-demand PDF jobs through the high priority queue and batch PostScript jobs through the medium or low priority queues instead of waiting for arbitrary batch windows at night.

Microsoft Windows applications typically perform either batch or on-demand printing, but rarely both at the same time. Users who require both types of printing typically have three limited options:

Mixing Batch and On-Demand Printing

Microsoft Windows applications like Word and Crystal Reports typically support automation through Visual Basic. Harmoni expands automation in two key dimensions. First, Harmoni provides a consistent programming interface for Java, COM, and .NET developers. Second, Harmoni supports automation across process and even machine boundaries. For example, a Java J2EE application, running under the control of a web/portal server such as IBM WebSphere on a mainframe or minicomputer could remotely control Harmoni for fast printing on a PC Server. As a second example, a Visual Basic application could "factor out" printing to a dedicated Harmoni server, to realize a boost in its printing speed. Many of our customers integrate Dynalivery software with middle-tier products such as BEA WebLogic, JBoss, Novell eXtend/SilverStream, Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP), and Microsoft .NET with C# to control printing.

Integration of Printing into other applications

According to recent tests, Harmoni can print over 1,000,000 PDF pages per day through Crystal Reports on a dual Intel Xeon 3.2 GHZ server hardware costing about only USD 3,000. The key to Harmoni's great speed is that it runs multiple copies of desktop applications concurrently. Typically for batch jobs, the concurrency which maximizes throughput is about two (2) to four (4) jobs per processor. Similar results are available with Microsoft Word input, as well as output formats including PostScript, RTF, HTML, SVG, JPEG, and PNG. In addition, Harmoni supports load balancing, enabling users to conveniently combine multiple inexpensive servers and reach throughputs of up to several million pages per day.

Fast Printing

Harmoni is the successor to Dynalivery's Parallel Crystal Report Server, available since 1998 and now used by customers in 11 countries, primarily in the finance industry. Customers typically use it in conjunction with database management systems to merge data from confidential databases into personalized documents, render them into PDF, and deliver them over the Internet.

Today Harmoni runs on Microsoft Windows 2000, 2003, and XP Professional, and automates Microsoft Word (10/11) and Crystal Reports (7/9). Support for transforming other market leading desktop applications into servers is under development. Beginning with Microsoft Word 11 (also called Word 2003 and WordML), support for open, XML-based document templates will be a priority over proprietary document templates, to give users full ownership of their own content and freedom in what software they choose to maintain it. Support for OEM printing applications is available by special agreement. An upcoming release of Harmoni, available during the 1st quarter of 2005, will add support for a XSLT print engine for Microsoft Word documents.

Harmoni is an specialty application server that automates desktop applications for fast printing of personalized documents.

Harmoni is an specialty application server that automates desktop applications for fast printing of personalized documents.