The printing infrastructure of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition is designed to facilitate the generation and distribution of various documents, such as invoices, reports, and forms. It leverages a combination of SAP technologies and services to provide a robust and flexible printing system in a cloud-based environment.
Furthermore, the configuration effort is minimized by enabling the existing customer's local printing infrastructure. The setup steps within SAP cloud-based solutions also follow a minimalistic approach to configuration and customizing. In the mentioned scenario, when (re)using the existing customer printing environment, the SAP Cloud Print Manager for Pull Integration has to be installed on a Windows host within the local customer infrastructure. This agent works with the Term SAP Print Service Term , which is used in cloud-based business products across the Term SAP Intelligent Enterprise Suite Term like Term SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition Term , and the cloud-based SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). This service exposes print queues, typically created and managed by key users in the business applications.
To use the SAP Print Service, some customization has to be done by the business application's development team or by a team member in the system administration of the cloud-based product. More precisely, the initialization of the SAP Print Service requires creating a Communication Arrangement based on an SAP-provided Communication Scenario. The communication partner, a so-called Communication System, is referenced by the Communication Arrangement and provides technical information (host, port, etc.) and authentication data (technical user).
The SAP Cloud Print Manager for Pull Integration gets access to the established scenario when the respective print queue connection is configured in the Windows-based SAP CPM for PI. From then on, the agent polls all locally configured print queues and forwards, waiting for output items to connect local printers in the customer network.
In this way, customers can easily establish the connection between the SAP Print Service and the customer’s local printers with a significantly reduced development effort.
The following graphic illustrates the core elements of this scenario.
The documents are routed to a specific Print Queue in the system which will be pulled by the SAP Cloud Print Manager for Pull Integration to a specific printer. The Output Parameter Determination defines the print rules via Business Rules Framework Plus (BRF+).
When a business user initiates the creation of a purchase order - for instance, for materials like aggregate—the system automatically references the Output Parameter Determination settings of the business application or the document type to determine the subsequent actions needed for handling. This involves deciding on the specific output method, such as whether the document should be emailed directly to stakeholders, formatted as an XML document for integration purposes, or printed as a physical copy for departmental processing. If we focus on output management for a printer or PDF paper output, the output parameter determination settings will also define which print queue a document is sent to.
To send the request to the specified printer, you must install the SAP Cloud Print Manager for Pull Integration on your local network, which connects the Print Queue and the local printer.