MarkVision Professional 7.1

This printer-management software comes free with Lexmark printers. It’s aimed at network administrators for monitoring, managing, and troubleshooting Lexmark network printers in a large organization. Though all its features are meant to work with Lexmark printers only, the software recognizes non-Lexmark printers as well and supports most of the basic features on them.

It works on a Client/Server basis and is available for both Windows and Unix platforms. The complete suite comprises a MarkVision Server, a client application, MarkVision Web client, MarkVision Messenger, and the Web-deployment package. (For details see box ‘Components of MarkVision’.) Except for the server and the client, other components are optional and you can select the ones you wish to install.

You can install the server on a Windows NT 4 Server with Service Pack 4, Windows 2000 Server, or on a Unix / Linux server. The client can be installed on a Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000 workstation or a Unix machine. You’d also need IE 4 or above, or Netscape Navigator 3 or above on the client . We installed the server on a Windows 2000 server and the client on Windows 98 with all the additional components. Installation is quite easy and doesn’t take much time.

After the installation is complete, the MarkVision client searches for a MarkVision server to connect. If not found, the application quits. So be sure to have a MarkVision Server up and running on your network. The MarkVision Client is easy-to-use and has all the features neatly arranged on its first or the Home screen. There are basically two ways–Quick find and Folders–to find or select the printers you wish to work with. Quick Find is used for finding printers based on some criteria such as IP address or Host name. A Folder, on the other hand, is used for grouping printers, in a logical order, based on some criteria. For example, you could group the printers within a department, together. We tested both these features and the software was able to detect the printers quickly without any glitches.

To make your job easier, you can define filters within a folder and group printers based on one or multiple characteristics. For example, within a folder you can set a filter to search for printers based on their model, paper size, color, or speed. 



Obviously, in case of filters, the contents of a folder would keep changing based on the state of the printers. So, for example, if you have set a filter within a folder to display all the printers based on, let’s say, paper size, then only those printers will be listed that meet the criteria. When presented with a list of printers, you can multi-select, and edit or view an attribute of the printers together.

You can also view the status of the printer (offline/online), current text displayed on LCD and the total number of pages printed for all printers, and toner levels, and the number of pages printed since power-on for Lexmark printers. You can opt to see a picture of the printer. You can see the operator panel of a Lexmark printer, and from there, you can control the various settings of the panel as if you were physically at the printer. You can even lock the operator panel of the printer so that no one else can tamper with your settings. However, in case of non-Lexmark printers you can’t control the operator panel from within the software.

Apart from this, the software also lets you create user accounts and groups, and define appropriate access rights, such as access to certain printers and tasks only. The user then sees only those options he has access to when he logs in. However, before you create a user account, you’d have to create an administrator account with all the access rights.

The MarkVision Messenger also worked without any problems with Lexmark printers and when set was able to send e-mail notifications informing the person about printer events such as the ‘printer is offline’ or the ‘tray is missing’. This is quite useful as the administrator can get these notifications automatically and can fix printer problems quickly. The features supported by the Web client are the same as the standalone application, except that the Web client takes a little longer to load.

Overall, this is a useful application that helps in identifying and fixing printing problems before they become too critical.

Neelima Vaid