Licensing
How the licensing works
The licensing of PDFCreator Server is based on a yearly license fee per server. The license entitles you to use the software, receive the latest updates and get priority e-mail support. A separate maintenance plan is not needed as updates and support are already integrated in the yearly all-in-one license fee.
Are you interested in PDFCreator Server?
In case you are a reseller and want to redistribute PDFCreator Server please contact our Customer Service Team for a quotation.
Workflow
PDFCreator Server Workflow
An admin sets up and configures PDFCreator Server. They can create one
or more printers and share them in the network. One or more printers are directly assigned to a queue with a certain configuration.
That makes using PDFCreator Server very easy for your users: they can just print to
a shared printer. No installation, no configuration, no user interaction required. The server will convert the printed file using the settings defined for the printer and store it in the defined location.
If the user has access to that location, he can retrieve his files from there.
And because several users can share the same printer and through that the same configuration, once your configuration needs to change for all users there is only one place where you need to adjust it.
Architecture
PDFCreator Server Architecture
The core of PDFCreator Server is a Windows service application. An admin can use the included GUI application to configure and start the service. He can create printers and assign queues to them. Each queue uses a different set of settings, similar to the profiles in PDFCreator. It is also possible to adjust the amount of threads the service uses to convert files.
The use of multiple threads enables PDFCreator Server to convert more than one file at the same time. This is the main reason why PDFCreator Server is so much faster at converting files than PDFCreator when dealing with high volume printing.
On starting the service, it is initialized with the defined queues and creates a thread pool containing the set number of threads. When a user prints using a PDFCreator Server printer that was shared in the network, the service is notified about the new print job.
The job is then stored in the queue assigned to the printer. As soon as a free thread is available in the threadpool, the job gets dequeued and is converted using the settings defined for the queue it came from. Once the conversion is completed, the created file is stored in the designated location.
The fact that PDFCreator Server uses a windows service allows the application to run without a user being logged on.