We have encountered a new problem, and I'm hoping someone else will have an insight. We have a fleet of Xerox WorkCentre printer/copiers deployed throughout our enterprise, and because we also have a number of itinerant users travelling between sites, we rely on a mix of directly configured output devices (using device types such as XRW001P, etc, and access method 'C'), and frontend control-based printing (device type POST2 and access method 'G').
All was working well, until the network printer operations group turned on job accounting on the printers at the hardware level.
Windows workstations, printing from Outlook, Excel, etc, have no problem. When they print, a dialog pops up asking for an account code, and as long as the user inputs a correct code, the print proceeds.
Printing from SAPGUI, however, isn't working so well. Using the POST2 driver and frontend printing (whether SAPLPD or control-based), the account code dialog never comes up, although the dialog to choose a Windows printer appears just fine. It looks to the user as if the printout went just fine, but in fact it never appears on the printer. Instead the printer outputs an error page with a message stating that an invalid or missing account code was used.
If we switch to use SAPWIN as the device type instead of POST2, then it works. The user gets the account code dialog, and they can print. The problem is that SAPWIN, being PCL-based, produces badly formatted output for many of our custom reports, whereas Postscript comes out perfectly (before activating account codes, anyway).
I've spent a couple hours on the phone with Xerox tech support, but so far we don't have a solution. It really looks to me like a problem either in the Windows print driver or in the Xerox firmware having to do with Xerox's implementation of Postscript, but it could also be in the POST2 device type.
Has anyone encountered this before? If so, how did you resolve it?
We're on ERP 6.0 EhP4 / NetWeaver 7.0 EhP1. Our workstations are a mix of Windows XP and Windows 7 (and it fails on both). We are using SAPGUI 7.30 patch 6 hotfix 1. It also looks like a problem in older SAPGUIs.
Thanks, and best regards,
Matt