Lesson 4: Configuring Network Printers

After you have set up and shared network printers, user and company printing needs might require you to configure printer settings so that your printing resources fit these needs better.

Three common configuration changes you can make are as follows:

You can share an existing nonshared printer if your printing load increases.

You can create a printer pool so that the printer automatically distributes print jobs to the first available print device. Then users don't have to search for an available printer.

You can set priorities between printers so that critical documents always print before noncritical documents.

After this lesson, you will be able to

Share an existing printer.

Create a printer pool.

Set priorities between printers.

Estimated lesson time: 15 minutes

Sharing an Existing Printer

If the printing demands on your network increase and your network has an existing, nonshared printer for a print device, you can share it so that users can print to the print device.

When you share a printer

You need to assign the printer a share name, which appears in My Network Places. Use an intuitive name to help users when they are browsing for a printer.

You can add printer drivers for all versions of Windows NT, for Windows 95 and Windows 98, and for Windows 2000 and Windows NT running on different hardware platforms.

Use the Sharing tab, in the Properties dialog box for the printer, to share an existing printer (see Figure 12.8).

Figure 12.8 The Sharing Tab in the Properties dialog box for a printer

You can access the Sharing tab in a printer's Properties dialog box as follows:

In the Printers folder, click the icon for the printer that you want to share.

On the File menu, click Properties.

In the Properties dialog box for the printer, click the Sharing tab.

After you have shared the printer, Windows 2000 puts an open hand under the printer icon, indicating that the printer is shared.

Setting Up a Printer Pool

A printer pool is one printer that is connected to multiple print devices through multiple ports on a print server. The print devices can be local or network-interface print devices. Print devices should be identical; however, you can use print devices that are not identical but that use the same printer driver. (See Figure 12.9.)

When you create a printer pool, users can print documents without having to find out which print device is available—the printer checks for an available port.

NOTE
When you set up a printer pool, place the print devices in the same physical area so that users can easily locate their documents.

Figure 12.9 A printer pool

A printer pool has the following advantages:

In a network with a high volume of printing, it decreases the time that documents wait on the print server.

It simplifies administration because you can administer multiple print devices from a single printer.

Before you create a printer pool, make sure that you connect the print devices to the print server.

You can create a printer pool by doing the following:

In the Properties dialog box for the printer, click the Ports tab.

Select the Enable Printer Pooling check box.

Select the check box for each port to which a print device that you want to add to the pool is connected, and then click OK.

Setting Priorities Between Printers

Setting priorities between printers makes it possible to set priorities between groups of documents that all print on the same print device. Multiple printers point to the same print device, which allows users to send critical documents to a high-priority printer and noncritical documents to a lower-priority printer. The critical documents always print first. Consider the following two methods to set priorities between printers:

Point two or more printers to the same print device—that is, the same port. The port can be either a physical port on the print server or a port that points to a network-interface print device.

Set a different priority for each printer that is connected to the print device, and then have different groups of users print to different printers, or have users send different types of documents to different printers.

For an example, see Figure 12.10. User1 sends documents to a printer with the lowest priority of 1, while User2 sends documents to a printer with the highest priority of 99. In this example, User2's documents always print before User1's.

Figure 12.10 A Printer pool with different priorities set

You can set the priority for a printer as follows:

In the Properties dialog box for the printer, click the Advanced tab.

In the Priority box, select the appropriate priority, and then click OK.

Windows 2000 sets the priority for the printer.

Lesson Summary

In this lesson, you learned that to share an existing printer, you use the Sharing tab in the Properties dialog box for the printer and select Shared As. After you have shared the printer, Windows 2000 puts an open hand under the printer icon, indicating that the printer is shared.

You also learned that a printer pool is one printer that is connected to multiple print devices through multiple ports on a print server. The print devices in a printer pool should be identical; however, you can use print devices that aren't identical if all the print devices use the same printer driver. A printer pool can decrease the time that documents wait on the print server, and it simplifies administration because you can administer multiple print devices from a single printer. To create a printer pool, in the Properties dialog box for the printer, use the Ports tab to select the Enable Printer Pooling check box.

Setting priorities between printers makes it possible to set priorities between groups of documents that all print on the same print device. Multiple printers point to the same print device, which allows users to send critical documents to a high-priority printer and noncritical documents to a lower-priority printer. The critical documents always print first.