Printer Management Essentials

Managing Print Queues
Some users repeatedly print out very large jobs, blocking printer access to everyone else until their job is complete. Using a combination of security settings and printer availability settings, it’s possible to ensure that these jobs are output only during specific times.

When a job is submitted to a shared printer that has particular availability settings, the print server holds the job until the printer becomes available and then outputs it. Printer availability allows big jobs to be submitted to a shared printer during office hours and output in the middle of the night. As the job is spooled on the print server, the client computer from which the job was submitted can be switched off when the person who uses it leaves for the evening. Figure 4 shows printer availability settings. To configure the times at which a shared printer is available, perform the following steps:

1. Start the Control Panel Printers and Faxes applet, right-click the printer, and select Properties.
2. On the Advanced tab, select the Available from option and configure the hours when the printer will be active.
3. Instruct users who are printing large, non-urgent jobs to submit to this shared printer instead so their jobs can be output during slower periods.

Publishing Printers via AD
If a domain is upgraded so that it has Windows 2003 R2 domain controllers (DCs), it’s possible to use AD to publish specific printers to users and computers that fall under the influence of a specific Group Policy Object (GPO). PMC, available with R2 and covered earlier in this article, vastly simplifies the process of deploying printers via AD. To deploy via Group Policy, an existing GPO must have been created and linked to an appropriate site, organizational unit (OU), or to the domain. To deploy a printer via AD using PMC, perform the following steps:

1. Open PMC.
2. Either in the All Printers node under Custom Printer Filters, or in the Printers node under a specific print server, locate the printer you want to use AD to deploy.
3. Right-click the printer and select Deploy with Group Policy.
4. In the Deploy with Group Policy dialog box, which Figure 5 shows, click Browse. Locate the target GPO and click OK.
5. Depending on whether the printer is to be deployed on a per-user and/or a per-computer basis, select the appropriate check box, then click Add.
6. Any existing printers that have been deployed using that GPO will be listed in the table. To remove these printers, select them and click Remove.
7. When you’re satisfied with the list of deployed printers, click OK.
8. The Deployed Printers node, at the bottom of the PMC screen, will now display the newly deployed printer.

Remember the Basics
No matter how careful you are in managing your printers, things can still go wrong. Some quick troubleshooting hints are listed in the sidebar “Troubleshooting Printer Problems,” page 42. Printer management is a daily task that almost all systems administrators deal with. Armed with the print management tools and options available in Windows 2003 R2, and this refresher, I hope you’ll find this task goes smoothly.