WINDOWS 1002000 PROFESSIONAL RESOURCE KIT [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Monitoring and Managing Print Jobs

There are a range of permissions that affect how users manage printers and receive printer status.

Job Queue Security Options

Users have different levels of access to manage a printer job queue depending on their security permissions.

Users working with printer queues are typically separated into two groups:

Administrative users: These users have Manage Printers and Manage Documents permissions. They have wide control over how the printer operates, regardless of where the print job originated.

General users: These users have Print permissions, which include viewing general information about a printer and managing documents that they send to the printer. They cannot control other people's print jobs.

Table 14.5 Defaults Rights for Printer Users

Scheduling

Print scheduling is established by users with administrative privileges by using the printer's Advanced tab, which is shown in Figure 14.10.

Figure 14.10 Advanced Tab of a Printer Properties Dialog Box

Users with administrative privileges can schedule printer availability, priority, and job priority. Print job priority only affects jobs in a printer's queue, not how jobs get to a print queue. Printer priority can be used to affect how print jobs reach print queues.

Printer Availability

Printer availability can be set to make the printer always available or only available during certain times of day.

Printer Priority

Printer priority determines the likelihood that a printer is chosen relative to other printers.

When adding printers, think of physical printers as the actual printers that print documents and virtual printers as representations of physical printers. You send a document to a virtual printer on the network and that print job is printed on paper by a physical printer.

Printer priority only has an effect when it is set differently for different virtual printers that correspond to the same physical printer. Setting different printer priorities for different virtual printers that correspond to different physical printers has no effect.

A few facts about printer priority:

Higher numbers correspond to higher priorities, so priority 1 printers are of the lowest priority.

Printer priority has no effect on job priority, so multiple jobs sent to the same virtual printer are affected by their job priority, but not by the printer's priority. Job priority can be set by viewing the properties of a job in a print queue, whereas print priority is set using the Priority field on the Advanced tab of a printer's property page.

Printer priority is only evaluated when determining which job to complete next. A printer does not stop processing a job it is already working on, even when the spooler receives a higher priority job, directed to a higher priority printer on the same port.

To set printer priorities for multiple virtual printers

Add a virtual printer using a specific port. For more information about how to add printers, see Windows 2000 Professional Help.

Repeat the process of adding virtual printers by using different names for the same physical printer until you have as many virtual printers as you need to accommodate your print prioritization needs.

Right-click a printer, click Properties, and set a Priority value. A greater priority value means that printer has higher, not lower priority. Repeat as necessary for other virtual printers that correspond to the same physical printer.

Using Computer Management, establish discrete groups to which you intend to add users, and associate with a printer. For more information about how to add groups, see Windows 2000 Professional Help.

Add groups to each virtual printer's Security tab and set permissions to allow specific groups to use the printer. Remember to remove other groups or disable allowing other groups to use the printer if you want to restrict access.

Add users to groups that correspond with the level of printer priority you want them to have. Add users to whom you want to give priority printer access to the group with permissions to use the printer that has a higher priority. Add the users intended to have lower printer priority access to the group with access to the lower priority printer. For more information about adding users to groups, see Windows 2000 Professional Help.

CAUTION

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When working with groups, it is typically better to remove the Everyone group from the printer rather than to deny access to the Everyone group and then add other groups with permitted users. This is because the Deny setting overrides any Allow settings. Therefore, if a user is a member of both the Everyone group, which is denied access to a printer, as well as the printer group you have designated allowed to use the printer, the Deny setting overrides the Allow setting.

When users install printers, they can do so based on their group membership, ensuring that the right users have the right level of priority access to printers.

To set printer priority

Open Printers, right-click the printer whose priority you want to set, and then click Properties.

Enter a number in the Priority field in the Advanced tab of the printer's Property page.

NOTE

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To set printer priority, you must have Manage Printer permissions for the printer in question.

Job Priority

Job Priority is set in the print queue and determines the priority for a particular document. After a job is printing, it is not affected by other higher priority print jobs, but when a printer finishes printing a job, it first chooses the job with the highest priority and then the job submitted first.

Consider the set of jobs that you might find in a printer's queue shown in Table 14.6.

Table 14.6 Sample Jobs in a Print Queue

Assuming no other jobs are submitted, and no one changes the priority of their jobs, these jobs would be handled in the order shown in Table 14.7.

Table 14.7 Order in Which Jobs in Table 14.6 Are Printed

To set job priority on an existing print job

Open the print queue.

Double-click the job whose priority you want to set.

On the General tab, move the Priority slider to set the job priority.

You can configure your fax service to only send fax jobs at specific times, such as when lower phone rates apply. To learn how to configure your Fax Service to your specific discount periods, see "Fax Service Configuration" earlier in this chapter.

Spooler Settings

Print spooling is configured by users with administrative privileges by using the printer's Advanced tab. Jobs can be sent to the spooler, or sent directly to the printer. If jobs are sent to the spooler, they can be configured to start printing as soon as possible or after the final page in a job has been sent to the spooler.

When you send a print job directly to the printer, your computer renders the entire job and then transfers it directly to the printer. When you send a print job to a spooler, your computer creates the job, including meta-information about how the job must be processed, and then sends the job to the spooler. The spooler then renders the job and sends it to the printer.

Sending a job directly to the printer is good because you remove a potential point of failure in printing documents, and all print job rendering is done on your computer, affording you more control, and you don't have to wait for other jobs to complete, as you might if you were printing to a queue on a print server that was being used by many users. Conversely, rendering a print job on your computer consumes computing resources, so you might experience reduced performance or have to wait until the print job has completed before doing anything.

Sending a print job to a spooler is good because your computer does not have to render the print job, meaning your computer's resource are more completely and immediately available. Conversely, sending a print job to a spooler fails if the print server with the spooler is unavailable, and you might have to wait for other jobs to finish spooling before your job is processed.

Spoolers can be configured to send print jobs as each page is rendered and ready for printing or to wait to begin printing until the entire job has been rendered. If the spooler is configured to print each page as soon as it is rendered, there might be a long wait between each printed page, resulting in slow print production, as the printer waits for each successive page to be rendered. Printers configured to print completely spooled jobs typically print faster after the job is started, but there can be a long wait while the job is spooled. If each spooler has many users, waiting until the entire job is spooled is typically best. If each spooler has few users, printing each page as it spools might be best.

Quick Printer Status

Windows 2000 allows you quick access to basic information about printers. Letting the mouse pointer hover over a printer displays that printer's name, status, number of documents in its queue, and its location.

Internet Printing Management

Printers being hosted by Windows 2000 servers with IIS or a Peer Web Server can receive jobs sent to them over the Internet Printing Protocol. Windows 2000 Internet print servers provide information to clients about the status of jobs they have received, as well as about printers that are available.

Jobs on a server can be viewed and managed using the Internet print server's Web pages. These pages provide information about jobs that are waiting in the queue, including the job's name, status, owner, number of pages, size, and when it was submitted.

An example of the print queue provided by an Internet print server appears in Figure 14.11.

Figure14.11 Sample Print Queue View for a Printer on an Internet Print Server

For more information about the status of a particular printer, view the printer's device status. This page can provide a range of information including the following:

The printer's current status.

The text the printer's display is currently presenting.

The printer's paper tray capabilities and status. For example, this might display the approximate number of pages available in each of the printer's trays.

The console lights currently illuminated. Console lights might include online, data, or attention.

An example of a device status on a Web page provided by an Internet print server appears in Figure 14.12.

Figure14.12 Sample Device Status for a Printer on an Internet Print Server