Methods and systems for the provision of printing services

摘要

The present invention relates to methods and systems for providing printing services over a communications network. In particular, the present invention enables a user to obtain print jobs at an unspecified location which may be remote from the source of the print job. A spooling server is used to store a print job received via the network from a print job source. A printer polling device is capable of polling the spooling server via the network to identify whether any print jobs associated with the printer polling device are available for printing at an associated printing device. The printing device may be assigned a unique identification number enabling a print job to be forwarded directly from a facsimile machine to a printing device, without a computer in between the printing device and facsimile machine.