Printer Properties

Printers in Windows Server 2008 have many configuration options that help control how the printers can be used and their accessibility. The options are accessible through tabs in the Properties dialog.

General Tab

The General tab gives access to the name of the printer, location, and comment that you configured when you first added the printer. Information about the printer features is displayed, including print speed, maximum resolution, and if the printer is color capable, double-sided, and can staple documents. A list of the paper types in the printer is also shown.

A test print can be sent from the General tab. You can also set the default print job properties, such as printing quality, the paper to use, oneor two-sided, and so on.

Sharing Tab

The Sharing tab has the basic option to share the printer along with the name of the share. Two additional options are also available. The first is to render the print jobs locally on the client computers prior to sending them to the print server. This is the default option and tells the client computer to create the print ready format. The second option is to list the printer in the AD.

One of the great advantages to using a printer server is driver management. The Sharing tab gives access to adding additional drivers via the Additional Drivers button. By default, when you add a printer, only the driver for the architecture of Windows Server 2008 is loaded. For example, if it's a 32-bit server, only x86-based drivers are installed. The dialog allows additional drivers to be selected, and the options vary based on the type of printer. If you have a 64-bit server, add the drivers for the 32-bit platform by enabling the x86 processor, so 32-bit clients can use the printer. You are prompted for the location of the additional drivers being added. In some cases, your printer drivers are available on media supplied with the printer or as a download from the manufacturer's web site, which requires extracting the driver files. If the downloaded driver file does not support extraction and requires installation, install the driver download onto a client computer. Then run the Print Management console on the client computer to import the driver to the print server.

When you load a driver for another architecture, the server operating system needs information about the other architecture, so you are also prompted for the ntprint.inf file for the architecture of the driver you are importing. This is not as easy to get as you might think because operating systems are now stored in an image file, so inserting the media for another architecture does nothing. Instead, you need to have an instance of the other architecture installed on the network somewhere. Navigate to the folder C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\ntprint.inf_xxxxxxxx on the other architecture machine (the xxxxxxxx is a unique hexadecimal string for each machine) for the ntprint.inf file, and then the driver can be installed. This will hopefully be resolved in a future release.

Ports Tab

The Ports tab allows ports that the printer operates over to be added, removed, and configured. For example, you could change the IP address that a printer resides on by modifying its port and switching protocols between RAW and LPR.

You also have the option to Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)-enable the port. This allows management and monitoring via SNMP, along with the option to specify a specific SNMP community name.

You can also enable bidirectional support, which is used for printers directly connected via parallel cables and to enable printer pooling. Printer pooling allows multiple devices to be selected for a single printer instance. This means that all the printers have to be the same type and use the same driver. It allows a single printer share to be connected to multiple printer devices, and any print jobs are distributed to all the selected ports. Printer pooling supports a mixture of local and network print devices. If you do not select Enable Printer Pooling, only one port may be selected.

Advanced Tab

The Advanced tab allows configuration of the more "down and dirty" settings. By default, a printer is available at all hours, but it is possible to configure a printer to only be available during certain hours. A loud printer could be prevented from printing during the day, and any jobs would queue until printing was allowed during night hours. You could also set two print queues to one device. One print queue could be for large documents that would print at night and not interfere with normal documents printed during the day. You might have experienced the misery of trying to print an urgent one-page document and adding paper to the printer for the kind soul who prints a 50-page document and does not keep an eye on it.

The priority sets the default priority for print jobs and higher priority print jobs print before lower priority jobs. This is only useful if you create multiple print queues pointing to the same physical printer. An example use would be to give executives access to the high priority printer queue so their documents would print before everyone else's low priority jobs. For this to work, the multiple printer queues must be hosted on the same Windows print server.

You could certainly combine the availability and priority options to have two printer queues to one device, setting nighttime printing to a lower priority than the daytime print queue, just in case someone is working late.

The driver used for the device can be updated by selecting the new driver from the drop-down, or by clicking the New Driver button, which opens up the Add Printer Driver Wizard. Select the new driver from the wizard. Then it is uploaded to the print server and automatically deployed to the client users of the printer the next time they attempt to print.

Because the generation of a printable job format takes less time than the actual printing, by default, documents are spooled to the print server and then sent to the printer. The actual printing is started as soon as the document starts to spool. You have the option to not start the actual printing until the entire document is spooled to the print server, which might be useful in the event a document takes longer to render than to print or a large document is canceled from the application during the printing. (Then nothing is sent to the printer). You can also configure the printing to go directly to the printer and not spool at all. This is not commonly used because it bypasses many of the advantages of a print server.

Additionally, spooling options are available:

Hold mismatched documents: This is not selected by default but if enabled, the spooler holds print jobs that don't match the setup for the printer. A good use would be for a printer that has selectable print trays or forms. With this option enabled, print jobs that are for a configuration other than the one currently selected would hold until the printer configuration matches the print job.
Print spooled documents first: Enabled by default and allows jobs that have completed spooling to print before jobs in the process of spooling, no matter what the document priorities are.
Keep printed documents: By default, print jobs are deleted after printing. With this option, print jobs are kept after printing.
Enable advanced printing features: A print job can be sent in a raw format that is suitable for the printer or in an enhanced metafile (EMF) format. EMF saves some print job processing done by the spooler, which means the application printing prints faster but generates a larger spool file. Enabling advanced printing features turns on the EMF mode of printing. If you have problems with some types of printing, a common fix is to turn off the advanced printing features, which disables EMF and makes the application generate the output ready for the destination print device.

A button to set printing defaults for the printer might be displayed if extra drivers are installed on the computer running the Print Management snap-in plus. There is also a button to select the print processor. The Separator button allows a SEP extension file to be printed at the start of each print job. The separator file has a specific format, and example separator files are found in the system32 folder for both PCL mode and postscript mode. PCL is the Printer Control Language originally created by Hewlett-Packard as a printer language without all the bells and whistles of postscript, which was one of the first languages designed to describe page layout and content for printers.

Security Tab

The Security tab is the last core tab of a printer and allows you to control who can print to the device, who can manage the properties of the printer, and who can manage print jobs on the printer queue. Server operators and print operators have permission to manage the printer and documents on the printer. These are both local groups on the computer, so an easy way to give a person permission to manage a printer and the documents is to add her to the Print Operators group. However, this gives her permission to manage any printer on the server.

At a more granular level, you can give users and groups permissions to manage printers and/or documents by adding them to the Security list and granting them allow permissions for the Manage Printers and/or Manage Documents permissions.

By default, the Everyone group has permission to print, which means everyone can print to the device. If you want to restrict who can print, you can either delete the Everyone group entry or leave the Everyone group entry and add specific users/groups to the dialog and set the Print permission to deny, which would stop only them from printing. The best option depends on your goal. If you are creating a print queue for just executives, the easiest option would be to remove the Everyone entry, add the Executive group, and grant it to allow permission for Print. If you're trying to stop Joe McTroublesome from using the printer, leave everyone intact, add Joe's user account, and set the Print permission to deny.

NOTE: Don't deny the Everyone group Print permissions. A deny always take precedence over an allow, and that would stop anyone from ever printing.

Be careful of auditing successful printing requests as this fills up the event log. The types of audit are the following:

Print: Audit the printing of documents and modifying of document printing preferences
Manage printers: Audit changing of document printing defaults, printer share or property changes, and deleting a printer
Manage documents: Audit the changes to a document job properties, any modification to the printing/deleting of a document, and changing document printing defaults
Read permissions: Audit when the permissions of a printer are read
Change permissions: Audit any change to the permissions of a printer
Take ownership: Audit where a change in ownership occurs

Other Tabs

You might see other tabs that are based on the printer driver. These might offer access to other print items, such as color configuration and format options.

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