Managing Printing in Windows Server 2003 R2


As we've previously mentioned, printing is a function that doesn't seem to ever go away. The concept of the paperless office seems even further away now than it did 10 years ago! If anything, the printers have become more full-featured, and more complicated for the system administrator to manage.

For those who have worked with printing in the previous versions of Windows, not much has changed over the years, until recently.

As we mentioned in the overview in Chapter 1, "Windows Server 2003 Environment," the R2 release of Windows Server 2003 includes the Print Management Console (PMC). The PMC allows the system administrator to manage all the printers on the network from a single console. This includes printers in the local office or on the other side of the world!

Installing the Print Management Console

The Print Management Console is an updated Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in that you can use to view and manage printers and print servers in your organization. You can use Print Management from any computer running Windows Server 2003 R2 or later, and you can manage all network printers on print servers running Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server 2003, or Windows Server 2003 R2.

The Print Management Console is not installed by default. It must be manually installed after your initial installation of Windows Server 2003 R2. In addition, the schema additions for R2 must be installed to support the new "Fast Query" lookup via LDAP in Active Directory.

Note: Updating the Schema

The procedure to update the schema for R2 is covered on the Microsoft TechNet website in the article "Steps for Extending the Schema" at http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/509ada1a-9fdc-45c1-8739-20085b20797b1033.mspx?mfr=true.


After the schema is updated, you can install the PMC in either of two ways, depending on what role you want your server to have:

  • Print server Install from the Manage Your Server screen. This sets up your server to not only include the PMC, but optimizes it for the print server role.

  • Management console If you want to manage the print servers only from your server, open Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel and insert the Windows Server 2003 R2 CD2 and select Add/Remove Windows Components. You can also insert the Windows Server 2003 R2, and select Install Optional Windows Components from the opening splash screen.

Note: R2 Only

Although the domain can still be Windows 2000 or Windows Server 2003 without R2, the server the PMC is installed on must be R2 or later.


To install the Print Management console on a Windows Server 2003 server, follow the procedure in Step by Step 7.6.

Step by Step

7.6 Installing the Print Management Console

1.

From the Start menu, click Start, Control Panel, Add or Remove Programs.

2.

In the Add or Remove Programs window, as shown in Figure 7.12, click Add/Remove Windows Components.



Figure 7.12. Installing Windows components.


3.

This starts the Windows Components Wizard, as shown in Figure 7.13. From the Windows Components dialog box, select the check box for Management and Monitoring tools, and then click the Details button.

Figure 7.13. Select the Management and Monitoring Tools component.


4.

In the Management and Monitoring Tools dialog box, select the Print Management Component subcomponent, as shown in Figure 7.14. Click OK to return to the wizard.



Figure 7.14. Select the Print Management Component.


5.

On the Windows Components dialog box, click the Next button to continue.

6.

When prompted, insert the requested Windows Server 2003 R2 CDs. (You will need both CD1 and CD2.)

7.

The necessary files are loaded. When completed, click the Finish button.

After the PMC is installed, it can be opened by selecting the Printer Management icon in the Administrative Tools folder, as shown in Figure 7.15.

Figure 7.15. The Print Management console.


As you can see in the figure, the printers that were already installed on the local server (Book8) were automatically added to the console. Now that we have the PMC installed, we can add any printers found on your local subnet, or import an existing print server.

To scan the local subnet for shared printers, follow the procedure in Step by Step 7.7.

Step by Step

7.7 Scanning the local subnet for printers

1.

From the Start menu, click Start, Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Print Management.

2.

In the Print Management MMC, right-click the local server and select Automatically Add Network Printers from the pop-up menu.

3.

This opens the Automatically Add Network Printers dialog box, as shown in Figure 7.16. Click the Start button to begin the scan.

Figure 7.16. The PMC allows you to scan the local subnet for printers and automatically add them to the console.


4.

When the Process is Complete status is displayed, click the Close button.

5.

Any additional printers found will be displayed in the Print Management console.

As you saw in the Step by Step, when the subnet is scanned, the information gathered will be used to automatically install the necessary printer drivers, create the print queues, and share the printers. In those cases where the required driver wasn't included with Windows Server 2003, you will be prompted for the location of the driver.

If you have existing print servers in your organization, the printers connected to them can be centrally managed from the PMC. This includes not only printers on your local subnet, but printers anywhere in your organization, even in remote locations.

These printers are added to the PMC by importing the printer configuration information from the existing print servers on your network.

To import your existing print servers, follow the procedure in Step by Step 7.8.

Step by Step

7.8 Importing print servers

1.

From the Start menu, click Start, Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Print Management.

2.

In the Print Management MMC, right-click the Print Servers entry in the left pane and select Add/Remove Servers from the pop-up menu.

3.

This opens the Automatically Add/Remove Servers dialog box, as shown in Figure 7.17.

Figure 7.17. The Add/Remove Servers dialog box allows you to enter existing print servers by name, IP address, or by browsing the network.


4.

Enter the print server that you want to add, and then click the Add to List button to add it to the list of print servers.

5.

Repeat for any additional print servers, and then click the OK button to save.

As you can see in Figure 7.18, all printers from the local print server and any imported print servers are shown in the console. From here their print queues can be monitored and managed, their drivers updated, and their default forms specified. Basically any task that you could do from each individual print server, you can now do from one console for all printers in your organization.

Figure 7.18. All the printers in your organization can be managed from a central console.


Adding Drivers via the Printer Management Console

Other than managing print queues, one of the most common tasks a system administrator has to perform in the printing arena is updating and/or adding print drivers. Drivers are commonly updated to add new functionality or to correct problems in the driver code. The PMC makes this easy because the drivers can be updated from a central location. To see how easy it is to add additional print drivers, follow the procedure in Step by Step 7.9.

Step by Step

7.9 Adding print drivers

1.

From the Start menu, click Start, Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Print Management.

2.

In the Print Management MMC, click the Print Servers entry in the left pane, and then select the print server that you want to install the new drivers on.

3.

Right-click the Drivers entry and select Add Driver from the pop-up menu.

4.

From the Processor and Operating System Selection dialog box shown in Figure 7.19, select the operating systems of all computers that will be using the printer. Click Next.



Figure 7.19. Select the Operating Systems that the clients will be using.


5.

The Printer Driver Selection dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 7.20. Click the Have Disk button.

Figure 7.20. Click the Have Disk button to install updated drivers.


6.

When the Install from Disk dialog box appears, browse to the location of the updated drivers, and then click OK.

7.

When the Completing the Add Printer Driver Wizard screen appears, click the Finish button. The new drivers will be installed, as shown in Figure 7.21.

Figure 7.21. The Print Management Console, showing the installed drivers, the operating systems supported, and the version numbers.


Using Printer Filters

Although the Print Management console provides a centralized view of all the printers in your organization, if your organization is very large, this might be too much of a good thing. For example, if you need to check on the status of a printer in Cleveland, it might be difficult to find it if there's 2,000 printers listed in the console.

Fortunately, Microsoft has taken situations such as this into consideration in the design of the PMC and provided the Printer Filters feature. As you can see in Figure 7.22, there are three preconfigured printer filters:

  • All Printers This list contains all printers in your organization.

  • Printers Not Ready This list shows any printer with a not ready condition because of error, being paused, out of paper, and so on.

  • Printers with Jobs This list shows all printers with print jobs currently in their print queues.

Figure 7.22. The Print Management Console, showing the standard custom printer filters.


Printer Filters can be used to group your printers according to various criteria, so that they can be found and managed easily. You can create a filter using the following properties:

  • Printer Name

  • Queue Status

  • Jobs in Queue

  • Server Name

  • Comments

  • Driver Name

  • Is Shared

  • Location

  • Share Name

In the situation that we mentioned previously, we want to identify a printer by location. Follow the procedure in Step by Step 7.10 to add a custom filter to identify the printers in Cleveland.

Step by Step

7.10 Adding a custom printer filter

1.

From the Start menu, click Start, Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Print Management.

2.

In the Print Management MMC, right-click the Custom Printer Filters entry in the left pane, and select Add New Printer Filter from the pop-up menu.

3.

This starts the New Printer Filter Wizard. On the first screen, shown in Figure 7.23, enter the name of the filter, and select the option to display the number of printers. Click Next.

Figure 7.23. Enter a name and description for the custom filter.


4.

From the Define a Printer Filter dialog box shown in Figure 7.24, select the conditions for the filter. Click Next.

Figure 7.24. Select the filter conditions from the drop-down lists. You can select multiple conditions to narrow your results.


5.

On the Set Notifications screen, you have the option to send and email or run a script when your condition is satisfied. This isn't necessary in our situation, so click the Finish button.

Figure 7.25. You can optionally send a notification email or run a script.


After the rule is in place, right-click it and select Refresh from the pop-up menu. The filtered printers will be listed, as shown in Figure 7.26.

Figure 7.26. Filtered View showing printers by location.


The nice thing about filters is that they are dynamicwhenever a printer satisfies the configured conditions, it is automatically added, or removed when the condition is no longer satisfied. This means that the system administrator has to create the filters only once, and they will be automatically updated.

Note: Deploying Printers Using Group Policy

Sharp observers will notice that the bottom node in the PMC is titled "Deployed Printers." One of the features in the PMC is the capability to deploy printers via Group Policy. We will discuss various GPO scenarios in Chapter 10, "Managing the User Environment by Using Group Policy."


With the new Print Management console, administrators have a single interface for managing all the printers connected to all the print servers within an organization. Through PMC, administrators can monitor printer errors, deploy printer connections to clients, and automatically find and install printers on a local branch office subnet.




MCSA. MCSE 70-290 Exam Prep. Managing and Maintaining a MicrosoftR Windows ServerT 2003 Environment
MCSA/MCSE 70-290 Exam Prep: Managing and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0789736489
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 219
Authors: Lee Scales

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