1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technique that causes printing instructed by a client terminal to be performed by a print device via a print server on the Internet.
2. Description of the Related Art
With reductions in communication costs due to increased broadband communications, and improvements in network environments, the use of SaaS (Software as a Service) for providing software functions as services on the Internet has been spreading.
SaaS has become a business model for providing a software function as a “service” via the Internet and obtaining the revenue in a form such as a monthly usage fee, rather than selling packaged software in the form of “licensing” and obtaining the revenue as has been conventional practice.
Even for print systems that have conventionally managed printers and print jobs on a network within a local area such as an office, support for SaaS is becoming a requirement as a print service on the Internet.
Besides SaaS, thin clients (clients that use only server-side programs and no client-side programs) provided with only a web browser are expected to become common. For SaaS, software such as applications does not need to be installed into a terminal, such as a personal computer, serving as a client. Accordingly, introducing a thin client has significant advantages for a user, including a reduction in the cost of managing software distributed to the client and prevention of information leakage owing to no data stored in the client. Thus, support for thin clients in SaaS is also an important issue for print systems.
Printers managed in a print system generally vary in function and specification. Therefore a user has to register printer configuration information with a server (a print server) of the print system in advance. According to the registered configuration information, the print server may provide a user interface with which the user sets print properties at the time of printing, and may provide the function of tracking a print job until the completion of printing.
A typical manner for the user to register the printer configuration information with the print server is such that the user directly inputs the printer configuration information in a printer registration user interface provided by the print system. According to this manner, the user needs to have a complete knowledge of the printer configuration information. In addition, if the registration requires input for many entries of the configuration information, the input is cumbersome.
In order to solve the above inconveniences, a method for facilitating the input of the printer configuration information has been proposed (for example, see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2010-160579).
Now, if a printer to be registered will be continuously used, registering the printer will facilitate the future use. However, it may be desired to perform printing without registering the printer information with the print server, such as when the printer is temporarily used for printing, and this desire has not been fulfilled. For example, if one desires to print electronic data with a printer provided in a hotel where he stays on business or in a convenience store, conventionally the printer information needs to be registered with a server even for the one-time use.