Success Story: Printer Code Conversion with NiceWatch

Cognitive Solutions, Inc., a manufacturer of portable and small desktop thermal label printers, needed a solution for exchanging legacy Epson line printers with new Cognitive Del Sol model thermal printers.

With the cooperation of their reseller partner, Digi-Trax Corporation, Cognitive needed to create a system that could easily swap old Epson printers with new Cognitive printers while complying with the end user’s request not to implement any host-side programming changes.

Niceware Technology

NiceLabel Suite with NiceWatch

Challenge

Cognitive and Digi-Trax had tackled labeling systems integration in the past. The problem that the end user had for this project was that although output could be changed within the current system the time and cost involved to make these changes in the output from the host system would be project prohibitive.

Cognitive began their search for a more cost effective solution to convert the Epson printer code on the fly and send the data to a new Cognitive printer. This new software solution would allow the end user to use their current printer output and map and redirect the data to a label on the Cognitive printer.

Solution

Cognitive, a Niceware reseller and printer partner had been successfully using NiceLabel for all of their label formatting and printing needs, including a bundled version of NiceLabel shipped with all new Cognitive printers. Cognitive decided to implement NiceLabel Suite with NiceWatch as the new code conversion solution for printing labels.

The document analysis filter in NiceWatch parses the Epson control codes sent from the host application. Using the same filter, NiceWatch maps the captured data to variables on the new label template that was created in NiceLabel Pro. NiceWatch is installed on a Windows2000 server. The host application connects to NiceWatch through a TCP/IP socket connection that is used to emulate the IP address and port of the old Epson printer.

NiceWatch automatically captures the data stream and sends the new label to a Cognitive printer on the network. “NiceLabel Suite with NiceWatch allowed us to easily capture and parse the existing data stream and map it to individual variables on the new label”, said Jeff Dragoo of Cognitive Solutions, Inc. “We provided an ‘on-the-fly’ printer code conversion solution to our customer at $1,000 per location cost.”

Benefits

NiceWatch is an event-driven application capable of monitoring and detecting data in many different formats to trigger the start of label printing. NiceWatch is an affordable and easy-to-deploy solution that automates label printing in a multi-operating system environment (Unix, AS/400, Host, etc.) or complex application environments (ERP, WMS, etc.).

NiceWatch provides the following benefits:

• Universal solution
• Seamless integration with foreign and remote systems
• Quick set up, NO programming required
• Reliable print server technology for high-demand printing environments
• Affordable and cost-effective solution
• No additional printer licensing

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