Easy Printer Management with Active Directory

Printer administration in Windows 2000 is easier and more powerful than it is in Windows NT. Microsoft added new printing features to the OS, including the ability to publish printers as Active Directory (AD) objects. When you publish printers as AD objects, you can easily access and manage them from anywhere in the enterprise. Let's examine some cool Win2K printing features that make installing and configuring printers and printing services a breeze.

Publishing Printers to AD
Microsoft integrated Win2K's print subsystem with AD. As a result, users can access the information in AD to locate printers, and administrators can manage printers from within AD. You use printer properties (e.g., printer model, color or black-and-white printing, paper type, physical location) as search criteria to find the information you need.

By default, Win2K print servers, whether they're running Win2K Server or Win2K Professional, publish their shared printers to AD as PrintQueue objects. A PrintQueue object contains a copy of the print server's information about a printer. If you change the printer's configuration on the print server, the change propagates to AD.

The PrintQueue object is in its print server's computer object. However, when you open the Active Directory Users and Computers Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in and select a computer in the tree pane, you don't see the PrintQueue objects in the details pane. The snap-in's default view doesn't display computers as containers and therefore doesn't display the computers' subobjects.

To view the subobjects, select Users, Groups, then select Computers as containers from the snap-in's View menu. You can then select any computer to display its subobjects, including PrintQueue objects, in the snap-in's details pane, as Figure 1, page 160, shows.

To publish a printer, the print server communicates asynchronously with the domain controller to send information about the printer to AD. If you have several domain controllers, the print server chooses a domain controller at random, and replication distributes the information to AD across the enterprise.

Print servers running any Win2K Server version automatically share printers and publish them to AD. (The exception is a USB printer, which you must manually share and publish.) However, print servers running Win2K Pro don't share their printers by default—you must manually share the printers. However, sharing a printer in Win2K Pro automatically configures that printer for AD publishing. Select the Sharing tab from the printer's Properties dialog box, then select the List in the Directory check box to publish the printer to AD.

Publishing shared printers to AD requires a bit more work if print servers are running NT and Windows 9x. You can install Windows Script Host (WSH), which Win2K and Win98 include, and execute the pubprn script (pubprn.vbs). You can find pubprn.vbs in Win2K's \%systemroot\%system32 folder.

The script uses the syntax cscript pubprn.vbs servername dspath to publish all shared printers on a server. In the syntax, dspath is the target container's path, which is

"LDAP://CN=<Container>,DC=<Domain>,
DC=<Company>, 
 DC=<Com>"

The "LDAP:// entries contain the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the target print server. (For more information about publishing NT and Win9x printers, see Zubair Ahmad, "Publishing Objects in Active Directory," http://www.win2000mag.com/, InstantDoc ID 8354.)

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