Patent ID: 7593125

Claim:
A method for printing to a plurality of printers, comprising: providing a GUI for an administrator to configure virtual ports, each of which is associated with at least one physical printer and at least one virtual printer, wherein each of the at least one virtual printer is configured from a physical printer; spooling a print job sent to a virtual printer to the virtual port associated with the virtual printer; and providing a GUI for the administrator to send the print job to the at least one physical printer associated with the virtual port, and for the administrator to specify a printing policy for sending the print job, which printing policy comprises use of Cluster printing policy comprising dividing a print job into pieces at page boundaries by applying dividing subpolicies of matching color, paper size, media type, and finishing characteristics of the pieces with the corresponding characteristics of the at least one physical printer, wherein the order of the application of the dividing subpolicies is customizable by an administrator using GUI; and sending the pieces to the at least one physical printer by applying sending subpolicies of optimization for fastest printing based on the speed of the at least one physical printer and distributing equal number of pages to the at least one physical printer.