Windows 7 / Getting Started

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Print Management MMC

The Print Management MMC functionality is focused around three main activity areas. The navigation pane displays a Custom Filters node, a Print Servers node, and a Deployed Printers node.

By default, four custom filters exist, which list all known printers, all known drivers, any printers that are not in a ready state (indicating a problem), and all printers with print jobs. Additional filters can be created to allow quick access to groups of printers. Think of these filters as ways to view all information known to the Print Management console in groups that might make your job easier, such as all laser printers in Building Four. You'll create some custom filters later.

The next major navigation node shows the print servers that are known to the Print Management MMC. By default, the local printer server is listed. For each print server, four areas of information are available: the drivers currently installed on the print server; the forms available for printing; ports used for printing local, terminal server, and IP; and the printers to which the server has connections.

The Deployed Printers node enables an easy view of the printers that are being deployed via group policy. This was a new capability in Windows 2003 R2 that used a combination of group policy and a client-side PushPrinterConnections.exe executable to check the group policy for printers and then add them. This client-side tool is not needed with Windows Vista/2008 clients.

Adding Printer Servers

The Print Management console is not just for managing Windows Server 2008 print servers. Print servers run Windows Server 2000, 2003, XP, and Vista. To add an additional print server, right-click on the Print Servers navigation node item and select Add/Remove Servers from the node's context menu. You can browse for new printers or enter in the name of the print server directly to add a server. If the local server is not currently displayed in the printer servers list, click the Add the Local Server button.

Adding a New Printer

One of the goals of the Print Management console is to make management of print server environments simpler, especially for the branch office with no local administrator to help set up the printers.

You can statically add a printer by right-clicking the Printers navigation node item for a specific print server and selecting Add Printer from the context menu. This launches the Network Printer Installation Wizard. Other options include adding a printer on a server's existing port, such as LPT, COM devices, a file device, ports associated with terminal services printers, and the XPSPort used for XPS printing to files. You might have additional or less ports on your server depending on your hardware. Nearly all modern printers are network-based, so our discussion focuses on that for now.

Nearly every printer purchased today has a network capability that automatically grabs an IP address via DHCP but allows static configuration via a simple menu. Many home printers even have wireless capabilities. After the printer has an IP address and that IP address is known to the administrator, the printer can be added via the Add a TCP/IP or Web Services Printer by IP Address or Hostname option. This opens up a new dialog asking for the name or IP of the printer.

By default, the Network Printer Installation Wizard auto-detects the type of printer, but it can be manually configured as a TCP/IP or Web Services printer. Also notice that by default, the Network Printer Installation Wizard attempts to detect the correct driver to use.

WEB SERVICES FOR PRINTING: The concept of Web Services printers might be new to some. Web Services are considered the next wave of the Internet evolution. It is an architecture to allow applications and services to talk to each other. The goal of Web Services printing is to emulate the plug-and-play experience seen when a printer is plugged into a PC via USB; the printer is seen and installed automatically. With Web Services printing, you also get better communication between the printer and the print client. You can now receive real endof- job completion notifications from the printer instead of just being notified when the job had been sent to the spooler. The security of the print communication is assured and that's just the beginning.

After entering the IP address of the printer, the Network Printer Installation Wizard contacts the printer to ascertain information about it, such as make and model, to calculate the drivers it should use.

If the printer has a driver that is part of the operating system, it is selected automatically. However, if it's a newer printer that is not known to the OS, you need to install a new driver or use the Microsoft XPS Document Writer or the Terminal Services Easy Print. The Microsoft XPS Document writer is a print-to-file driver that acts like a normal printer target but the output is a file in the XPS format. You would never want to use this driver for a real printer, but it is good for printing to an XPS file.

If you are installing a new printer driver, select the Install a New Driver option. This opens a dialog with a list of all the drivers known to the OS. You can select a driver to work with the printer or select the Have Disk button to install a new driver from media or the network. A list of all printers that are serviced by the driver file selected are displayed. Select the relevant driver.

The final dialog specifies a name for the printer. If you have a large or small environment, give the printer a meaningful name that might describe its type, location, and capabilities (such as color, dual-sided, and so on). The same dialog allows a share to be created for the printer. The share has separate location and comment fields, which allows greater detail to be given.

A confirmation screen for the settings is displayed. Click Next to install any additional drivers that are required and to complete the installation of the printer to the print server. The completion dialog displays the status of the driver and printer installation, an option to print a test page, and an option to keep the wizard running and add another printer. Select any options and click Finish.

After the printer is added to a print server, its properties can be examined. However, if you are looking at a printer on a remote print server, you might get warnings that the driver for the remote printer is not loaded on the local computer. Not all of the printer properties might be available, and you are given the option of installing the driver for the printer to remedy the situation.

The context menu of a printer gives a number of options, including opening the print queue, pausing/resuming printing on the queue (useful for planned maintenance on a device), canceling all pending jobs, printing a test page, managing sharing (which is just a shortcut to the Sharing tab of the printer properties), and viewing the properties of the printer. Depending on the printer's current list status in the AD, you can select the List in Directory or Remove from Directory option.

If you open the queue of a printer, you can see all the pending print jobs. The administrator or the person delegated for printer permissions can delete individual jobs or change the properties of a print job, such as its priority and when it can print. Changing the priorities of a print item is useful if you need it to print ahead of other items in the queue. The other tabs available vary based on the type of target printer and the local availability of the driver for the printer. All printers have an Advanced tab with a standard interface to printing options. Three additional tabs because this computer runs the Print Management console and has the driver for the HP printer installed, so all the enhanced properties provided by the printer driver are displayed.

If you want an easy, fast view of a printer's queue, enable the Extended View via the Printers navigation node item's context menu. This option adds a pane in the console that has two tabs. The first tab shows the jobs for the printer, and the second tab loads the Web page from the printer if it has one. This avoids the need to launch a separate process to manage some aspects of the device that might not be possible via the console or to expose information that is otherwise not available. The printer's Web page might also be useful for troubleshooting.