The IFS Print Agent is a stand-alone server component responsible for printing formatted business documents (operational reports) created using Report Designer layouts. To fully understand the nature of the Print Agent it's highly recommended to first familiarize your self with the Report Formatter.
The Print Agent should be installed close to the printers it's serving. The Print Agent should never be connected to the printers through a WAN. It's perfectly ok to have a WAN connection between the central servers (database and application server) and the Print Agent, but the printers and the Print Agent should reside on the same LAN. Multiple Print Agents can be set up on the same or different sites to serve a printer farm. Several Print Agents may also be set up to serve the same logical and physical printers for redundancy or performance reasons.
When a report is printed to a logical printer using a Report Designer layout, the Report Formatter picks up the job and formats the report given the layout and configured locale. The result of the formatting step is a PDF document that is stored in the database. The Print Agent polls the print queue for PDF's to be printed at a configurable interval and when a formatted report is found it's transferred over the network and printed on the local area network by the Print Agent to the printer defined in the logical to physical printer mapping.
There should be at least one Print Agent in each site. The Print Agents hold the printer mappings between logical and physical printer names. A Print Agent should never be set up to spool a print job over a WAN connection to the printer.