Print Management

In any corporate environment, you rarely see each computer hooked up to its own USB printer. Instead, shared printers are used that offer superior features. Although each desktop could directly connect to the shared printer via an IP connection, each client would have to maintain the configuration of the connection and manually install the printer driver. Central management of printer use or a repository of printers available would not be possible.

The Windows Server 2008 platform offers a great deal of functionality for print services, including features that benefit users and administrators. Today, organizations have many branch locations, each with local print servers. Windows Server 2008 helps meet the challenge by managing multiple print servers as one.

Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 saw the integration of the XML Paper Specification (XPS), which was previously made available as part of the XPS Essentials Pack for XP and Windows Server 2003. The XPS capability enabled the XPS print path, which spooled documents in the XPS format. This gave greater fidelity, performance, and security to the printing process. This requires an XPSDrv printer driver.

This XPS spooling also applies for server-side spooling, assuming that client-side rendering is enabled (which is the default). The client renders to XML and sends to the printer's spool file. Newer printers are XPSenabled, maintaining the XPS data from the client to the server to the printer with no conversions. These printers are known as directconsumption printers. Non-XPS printers have to provide a filter that converts the XPS spool file to the native Page Description Language (PDL) of the printer. The old Graphics Device Interface (GDI) print path is still provided for non-XPSDrv printer drivers and results in the old style Enhanced Metafile (EMF) spool file storage and subsequent rendering. If you have an older Win32 application that uses GDI graphics that is sent to an XPSDrv printer, a GDI-to-XPS conversion is performed so you still get the XPS spooling and other XPS advantages previously discussed. The opposite applies as well. If you print from a Windows Presentation Foundation application that natively outputs to XPS and you are using an non-XPSDrv, an XPS-to-GDI conversion takes place. XPS-based clientserver printing is one of those "better together" Vista/Windows Server 2008 winners. If you want to know the ins and outs of XPS-based printing, Microsoft has a whitepaper on the entire XPS printing pipe at www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/print/XPSDrv_FilterPipe.mspx.

Now let's manage some printing.

Installing the Windows Server 2008 Print Management Components

Like all the 2008 components, you install the Print Services Role via the Server Manager interface. After it is selected, three subservices are associated with the Print Services role:

• Print Server: Includes the Print Management MMC snap-in that manages print servers and their prints, plus the capability to migrate printers between print servers. This is the same MMC that is part of Windows Vista Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions. Vista can manage your Windows Server 2008 printer environment in small environments (up to 10 concurrent network connections).
• LPD Service: An implementation of the Line Printer Daemon designed to provide print support to UNIX-based clients. Implementations of Line Printer Remote (LPR) are available for other platforms, including Windows Vista.
• Internet Printing: Has two features: The first enables Web-based print server management, and the second provides support for the Internet Printing Protocol, which allows printing to the print server from the Web. Because the Internet Printing feature operates via a web site, the print server must also have the Web Server role installed. This role is automatically selected and enabled during the selection of the Internet Printing subrole.

The LPD Service requires no special configuration. During installation, the local server firewall is updated to allow inbound connection on port 515, over which LPR operates.