Printer Management Essentials

You can use these scripts to manage remote printers as well as printers attached to the computer on which they are run. You could also specify alternative credentials with each of these scripts. A properly configured batch file could be used to pause all printers in a domain or purge their print queues. For more information about these command-line options, see the Microsoft article “New Command- Line Tools” at technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/4c475b4ce5ee-444c-a730-ccb7a13e03b41033.mspx?mfr=true.

Configuring Printer Pools
A bottleneck for some organizations is the speed at which printer hardware outputs pages. Adding a second or a third shared printer often doesn’t work as a solution because it’s difficult to balance users’ output manually. The solution is printer pools, which balance output across multiple print devices.

With a printer pool, users send jobs to a single shared printer, and that printer allocates the job to the next available hardware device in the pool. The primary limitation of printer pools is that the driver used must be compatible with all printer hardware in the pool. Generally this means that you should use identical printer hardware for each device in the pool, but you can get away with using a basic printer driver that’s compatible with many models of printers as long as your users don’t require many printing features.

The devices used in a printer pool should be located in the same area, as users aren’t notified which specific device has printed their jobs. If you set up a printer pool with identical devices on the first, second, and third floors of a building, users might have to check all three locations to find their jobs. To configure a printer pool on an existing shared printer, perform the following steps:

1. Start the Control Panel Printers and Faxes applet, rightclick the shared printer you want to pool, and select Properties.
2. On the Ports tab, select the Enable printer pooling check box.
3. Click Add Port to add a new port. Configure this port to connect to an extra hardware device.
4. Keep adding ports until all print devices in the pool are added to the shared printer.

Setting Printer Permissions
By default, all users in a domain are able to print to a shared printer. Often you will want to configure printers so that only particular groups can print to specific printers. For example, it might be necessary to ensure that only the CEO and his or her administrative assistant can print to the shared printer in the assistant’s office. Three basic print permissions are available for each shared printer:

• Print—This permission allows the user or group granted it to print to the shared printer.
• Manage Printers—This permission allows the user or group granted it to modify shared printer properties, including print permissions.
• Manage Documents—Users or groups granted this permission can pause, restart, or delete any documents in the printer queue, regardless of who owns them. By default, users have the Manage Documents permission on their own print jobs.

To configure permissions on a shared printer, perform the following steps:

1. Start the Control Panel Printers and Faxes applet, right-click the printer, and select Properties.
2. Click the Security tab, which Figure 3 shows. Under Group or user names, remove the Everyone group from the list by selecting it and clicking Remove.
3. Click Add to add the group or users that will have permission to print to the shared printer.

Setting Print Priority
Multiple shared printers can be configured to use a single print device. By assigning each shared printer a different priority and configuring separate permissions on those shared printers, it’s possible to let one group jump the queue and print their documents before another group. The default priority of a shared printer is set to the lowest possible value, which is 1. The highest possible priority value is 99. If there are five jobs with a priority of 1 in the queue and a job with a priority of 99 is submitted, the job with the priority of 99 will be bumped to the top of the queue but won’t displace the job currently being output on the print device even if it’s of a lower priority. To configure a printer’s priority, perform the following steps:

1. Start the Control Panel Printers and Faxes applet, right-click the printer, and select Properties.
2. Click the Advanced tab and adjust the number in the Priority box to the appropriate setting.
3. To ensure that the group that should have its documents printed most quickly is the only one allowed to use the shared printer, configure security appropriately as I covered in the previous steps.

The most common mistake in configuring print priorities is to assume that a lower assigned priority number means documents will print faster. Ensure that the shared printer you configure for your organization’s executives has a higher priority than the one you configure for ordinary users.

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