Spring 2025 AFP Consortium Meeting Recap: New discussions on IPDS Security, Page Placement, and Non-ASCII Job Names
Dennis Carney, President, AFP Consortium
In April 2025, AFP Consortium members gathered for the 2025 AFP Consortium Spring Meeting hosted by Ricoh in Boulder, Colorado. This was the first meeting that I was leading as AFP Consortium President, and I was delighted with the excellent discussions we had; our members are truly industry experts and are a joy to work with.
Our Fall meeting will be hosted by RISO in Lyon, France. We hope to see many AFP Consortium members in attendance to continue progressing this important technology—in such a beautiful city!
Meanwhile, here are some highlights from our Spring meeting:
Other topics of note are:
Until next time,
Dennis
In April 2025, AFP Consortium members gathered for the 2025 AFP Consortium Spring Meeting hosted by Ricoh in Boulder, Colorado. This was the first meeting that I was leading as AFP Consortium President, and I was delighted with the excellent discussions we had; our members are truly industry experts and are a joy to work with.
Our Fall meeting will be hosted by RISO in Lyon, France. We hope to see many AFP Consortium members in attendance to continue progressing this important technology—in such a beautiful city!
Meanwhile, here are some highlights from our Spring meeting:
- Discussion on a new security topic: how to encrypt the IPDS communication between the host and the printer. We expect to issue an official recommendation later this year to provide "in transit" encryption for the IPDS stream.
- Continued security discussions on new architecture to allow customers to encrypt and protect objects in AFP, including text, images, graphics, barcodes, object containers, and metadata. This provides "at rest" encryption for sensitive data objects in both MO:DCA and IPDS.
- Completion of our detailed requirements review of potential future AFP architecture enhancements. Work is already under way on many of the previously discussed items, with others in the wings.
Other topics of note are:
- Three short videos that extol the value of AFP are now available on our website. Please feel free to share these videos to explain AFP to others.
- The possibility to add a new method to place pages on a sheet that will provide more flexibility and functionality than the current N-up support.
- Thoughts on how to enable the host to pass non-ASCII job names to be displayed on the printer console.
- Review of a draft new CMOCA Reference, with plans to publish in May 2025.
- Review of the results of our AFP user survey. Thanks to everyone who responded! We would love to hear your opinion as well. The survey is available here.
Until next time,
Dennis
