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 ConsoleThe 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:
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.
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.
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.
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 ConsoleOther 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.
Figure 7.21. The Print Management Console, showing the installed drivers, the operating systems supported, and the version numbers.Using Printer FiltersAlthough 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:
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:
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.
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. |