Enabling Printer Location Tracking

Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Scripting Guide

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To enable printer location tracking, you must do the following:

1. Develop a naming scheme for your organization.

   Typically, naming schemes in large organizations use the format Country/City/Building/Floor: for example, USA/Redmond/Building 37/Floor 3. Although you can use any naming scheme, the scheme must match the physical layout of your subnets. If a particular subnet spans two floors in your building (for example, floors 3 and 4), your naming scheme must reflect this: USA/Redmond/Building 37/Floors 3 and 4.

2. Associate each subnet in your organization with a location, using your chosen naming scheme.

   For example, suppose you have two subnets (192.168.1 and 192.168.2) and two locations (Building 1/Floor 1 and Building 1/Floor2). In Active Directory Sites and Services, set the location of subnet 192.168.1 to Building 1/Floor 1 and the location of subnet 192.168.2 to Building 1/Floor 2.

3. Set the location attribute for your printers and your computers using the naming scheme previously developed.

   You must use the same naming scheme to set the locations for both printers and computers. If you do not, printer location tracking either fails completely or provides misleading results.

4. Enable (at the domain level) the Group Policy setting Pre-populate printer search location text.

   This is located under Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Printers.

When developing a naming scheme, keep the following in mind:

• You must use the forward slash (/) character to divide the sections of a name. USA/Redmond/Building 37/Floor 3 is a valid name; USA-Redmond-Building 37-Floor 3 is not.
• Each name section is limited to 32 characters, and a location is limited to a total of 260 characters. Each name section represents the portion of a name between the / characters. For example, the name USA/Redmond/Building 37 has three name sections:
  • USA
  • Redmond
  • Building 37
• Searches are based on the locations given to subnets. For example, if you have a subnet with the location USA/Redmond/Building 37, your searches can resolve only to the Building level. In a situation such as this, you cannot search for printers on individual floors within a building. These searches are possible only if your subnet locations map to floor numbers.

To make the process of finding a printer easier for your users, however, you can include additional information as part of a printer location, even if that information is ignored when a search is performed. For example, if the subnet location is USA/Redmond/Building 37/Floor 3, you can make it easier for users to pinpoint the location of a printer by adding extra identifying information to the location string for those devices. Thus, you might have a printer with the location USA/Redmond/Building 37/Floor 3/Mail Room or USA/Redmond/Building 37/Floor 3/Room 351 near the back wall. Although you can only search for a particular building, users finding all the printers in Building 37 will be able to view the full description and can then manually select the nearest printer.

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