Methods and apparatus for providing printing services by assigning a telephone number to a printer

Abstract

The present invention provides methods and systems for providing printing services. In particular, the present invention enables a print job source, for example a facsimile machine, to print directly to a printer over a network, without an intervening personal computer. In an example embodiment of the invention, a telephone number is assigned to a printer. A print job is associated with the telephone number. The print job is then forwarded from a print job source to a spooling server over a network. The print job is associated with the printer at the spooling server based on the telephone number. The print job is then forwarded from the spooling server to the printer and printed.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.