Windows Vista / Getting Started

Printer Permissions

One of the best security practices that an administrator can follow is to not routinely log on to Vista using an administrator account. That is, you should only use your administrator privileges for managing certain parts of Vista that require administrator privileges. The rest of the time you should log on with a more limited user account. However, you should take the administrator privileges out of its sheath long enough to assign printer permissions.
Printer permissions are used to establish which printer properties yourself or your users can manage. Permissions can be managed (locally) by the person who installed the printer or by the network administrator.

Vista includes four types of printer permissions:

Print
User have the default permission level that allows them to print and cancel, pause, or restart files that they send to a printer.

Manage documents
This permission allows users to manage all jobs for a printer that are waiting in the print queue, including documents or files that are being printed by other users.

Manage printers
This permission allows users to manage printer preferences, including the ability to rename, delete, and share the printer. This permission is granted by default to members of the administrator group for a computer.

Special permissions
This permission is normally only used by the system administrator, and is used to change the printer owner.

Permissions are germane to troubleshooting, because a user might be trying to do something he or she is not authorized to do. For example, if the user is trying to move a document to the head of the print queue and cannot do it, there may not be a problem beyond the fact that the user does not have the permission to do so.

[Previous] [Contents] [Next]