You want to print from your SAP System to the same printer you print to from your Windows PC, Apple Macintosh, or UNIX workstation. You can print to these printers using frontend printing, even if the printers themselves are not defined in the SAP spool system.

Frontend print requests are processed, as for other output methods, by the spool work process. This may cause conflicts between regular print requests and frontend print requests in your SAP spool system. Even if you have classified spool servers and output devices according to the type of output (for example, production printing or mass printing), as we recommend, frontend printing may still cause server load problems.

The following describes how to configure your system to avoid these problems.

• Set up a spool service on every application server, if possible. Add the profile parameter rsdisp/wp_no_spo to the instance profile of each server.
• Set the maximum number of spool work processes to be used for frontend printing. The default setting is a maximum of one spool work process for frontend printing for each server. If you need to use more work processes for frontend printing, add the profile parameter rsdisp/wp_no_Fro_max to the instance profile and increase the value for work processes.
• To ensure that your SAP spool system can process requests as effectively as before, you should increase the number of spool work processes by at least one, as one of the spool work processes is always used for frontend printing in the standard system.

• Specify a spool server to be used for all frontend print requests in your SAP System. To do this, use the profile parameter rspo/local_print/server. In spool administration (transaction SPAD), specify an alternate server for this server, to ensure printing can continue if the first server is down.