Patent ID: 6788902
Filing Date: 2004-09-07
Classification: G03G,G06K,H04N

Abstract:
A service support system for an image forming apparatus comprising the image forming apparatus and a service support center, which communicate with each other with messages on a network,the image forming apparatus comprising: a printing device that outputs an image on a printing medium; an extracting device that extracts information regarding the image forming apparatus required for a service support; a sending device that sends the information extracted by the extracting device to the service support center as a main body of a message or an attachment to the message; a receiving device that receives a reply message from the service support center in response to the message sent by the sending device; and a control device that activates the image forming apparatus based on the reply message; the service support center comprising: a database that previously stores a plurality of maintenance processes required for the image forming apparatus; a receiving device that receives the message sent from the image forming apparatus; a searching device that searches maintenance information corresponding to the information contained in the received message from the database; and a sending device that sends the searched maintenance information to the image forming apparatus as a main body of the reply message or an attachment to the reply message, wherein the database of the service support center previously stores a plurality of image data for cleaning pages associated with cleaning processes required for the image forming apparatus, the service support center searches the image data for a cleaning page matching the information sent from the image forming apparatus from the database and sends the image data for the cleaning page to the image forming apparatus as the main body of the reply message or the attachment to the reply message, and the image forming apparatus receives the reply message and activates the printing device based on the image data contained in the reply message to output the cleaning page.