Chapter 7 “Configuring Print Services”

Thursday, March 14, 2013

The four components involved in the printing process using Microsoft Windows are the Print Device, the Printer, the Print Server, and the Printer Driver.  A print device is the actual hardware that produces the hard copy documents on paper or other printable material.  The printer is the software interface that the computer uses to communicate with the print device.  A print server is a computer or other standalone device that receives print jobs from clients and sends them to print devices.  The printer driver is a device driver that converts the print job generated by applications into an appropriate string of commands for a specific print device.  Print devices can be locally attached to a computer and used on that computer only or shared by that computer over a network.  They can also be attached directly to the network and made available to all computers throughout the entire network.  Printer security is somewhat like folder share security, clients must have the correct permissions in order to access the shared print device.  The standard print permissions are print, manage printers, and manage documents.  The print permission allows users to print documents, pause, resume, restart, and cancel the user’s own documents.  Manage printers allows a user to cancel all documents, share a printer, change printer properties, delete a printer, and change printer permissions.  Manage documents allows a user to pause, resume, restart, and cancel all user’s documents as well as control job settings for all documents.  Installing the print services role and using the print management console provides additional administrative tools that can consolidate the controls for the printing components throughout the entire enterprise into a single console.  You can access print queues and properties sheets for all of the networked printers, deploy printers to client computers using group policy, and create custom views that simplify the process of detecting print devices that need attention.