Printer Management Essentials

Executive Summary: Knowing the essentials of printer management can make your life and your users' lives easier. Basics covered include sharing a printer; installing extra drivers; managing printers using the Print Management Console (PMC) snap-in and command-line utilities; configuring printer pools, permissions, and priorities; deploying printers via Active Directory (AD), and print queue troubleshooting.

Printer management is a crucial yet often annoying part of many IT pros’ jobs. To keep things running smoothly, it’s helpful to have a good background on the essentials of printer management. Let’s look at how to share a printer, install extra drivers, use the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) Print Management Console (PMC) snap-in, troubleshoot, and do the myriad other tasks that contribute to your users’ satisfaction and your job security. For consistency’s sake, we’ll assume you’re logged on to Windows Server 2003 with an account that has administrator permissions.

Sharing a Printer
After a printer is connected to a Windows 2003 computer and you verify that it works using a print test page, you can share the printer. To share a printer, perform the following steps:

1. Start the Control Panel Printers and Faxes applet, right-click the printer, and select Properties.
2. Click the Sharing tab, then select the Share this Printer radio button.
3. Enter the printer’s shared name. You should try to name your printers according to a convention that is easily understood. A convention that incorporates location and function is recommended. Ensure that the List in the directory check box is selected.
4. Click OK to close the dialog box.
5. Right-click the printer again and select Rename.
6. Enter the same name that you entered in the shared name dialog box.

Always remember that a printer’s shared name isn’t the same as the name listed in AD, even though the dialog box gives the impression that this is the case. The AD listing is based on the name the printer is assigned in the host Windows 2003 computer’s Printers and Faxes folder. If you can’t find a recently shared printer within the directory, check what name is assigned to the printer in Printers and Faxes. You should attempt to ensure that these names match to avoid confusion.

Installing Extra Print Drivers
Unless already installed, a client computer will obtain and install the necessary drivers when it first connects to a shared printer. Microsoft calls this technology “Point and Print.” In general, a printer driver installed on a Windows 2003 computer will work with Windows XP and Windows 2000 Professional computers. Where you must be careful is when you have a mix of computers with 32- and 64-bit processors. If your print server’s processor architecture differs from some or all of your print clients (e.g., x64 as opposed to 32-bit), you must manually install drivers for the alternative architecture when you configure the shared printer. To do this, perform the following steps:

1. Start the Control Panel Printers and Faxes applet, right-click the printer, and select Properties.
2. On the Sharing tab, click Additional Drivers.
3. Select the check box next to the additional driver you want to install, such as x64, as Figure 1 shows, and click OK.
4. Enter the path to the additional driver software and click OK. You should ensure that printer drivers are installed on the print server so that user’s aren’t prompted for drivers on their workstations.

It’s not possible to install Windows Vistaspecific drivers in this manner. Usually this won’t be a problem because Windows 2003 and XP client printers generally work with Vista clients. However, in some cases, drivers that work for XP and Windows 2003 don’t work on Vista because of Vista’s tighter security. If no compatible driver exists on the Windows 2003 print server, Vista will check its own driver store. If a Vista-compatible driver already exists on the Vista client computer, this driver will automatically be used. If no such driver is included with Vista, you’ll need to install an updated driver on the Vista client computer. You can do so manually or by deploying the printer to the Vista client through AD, which I cover later in this article.

Managing Printers
Although I recommend you use the PMC snap-in to manage printers, the management tool that most administrators are used to is the Control Panel Printers and Faxes applet in Windows 2003 and XP. This applet provides a list of printers installed on the computer, the number of documents in the queue, and the status of the printer. Double-clicking a printer in the Printers and Faxes applet shows you the shared printer’s queue. The printer queue provides you with information about who submitted the document, how large it is, and when it was submitted. You can view two important menus in the print queue:

• The Printer menu lets you pause all print jobs, cancel all print jobs, and configure the printer to be used offline.
• The Document menu, which you access by selecting a document in the queue, lets you pause the document, resume the document, cancel the print job, and restart the print job from the beginning.

Print Management Console. The best tool for managing printers is the PMC snap-in, which is available in Windows 2003 R2 when you add the Print Server role. It’s not presently available for Windows 2003 SP1. The primary benefit of PMC over previous methods of printer management is that it lets an administrator view and manage all printers in an organization, as Figure 2 shows, not just those connected to the local print server. PMC can monitor shared printers attached to Windows 2003 R2, Windows 2003, and Win2K Server print servers.

Perhaps the most useful aspect of PMC is the Custom Printer Filters node, which lets an administrator view printers in the organization that aren’t ready due to an error and that require attention. At this node, you can also create individual custom filters and configure them to show only shared printers with a specific number of print jobs, which you could use to identify heavily used printers. You can also configure filters to send email alerts to administrators when specified conditions, such as a paper jam, occur. Email alerts can be configured only with created filters and can’t be applied to the console’s default filters.

Command line. Command-line printer management options let you automate certain printer management functions through scripting. Command-line printer management programs and scripts are located in the \%systemroot% system32 directory. The most useful printer management scripts are the following:

• prnjobs.vbs—can be used to view and manage print jobs
• prncfg.vbs—allows shared printers to be modified
• prnqctl.vbs—allows management of a printer’s queue

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