2. Managing printers using Print Management
The Print Management snap-in was first introduced in Windows
Server 2003 R2. The snap-in was then enhanced with new functionality
and performance and scalability improvements, first in Windows Server
2008 and then in Windows Server 2008 R2. The snap-in has not
significantly changed, however, in Windows Server 2012. This is good
news for Windows administrators because it means they can make use of
their existing knowledge of how to manage print servers running
previous versions of Windows Server. As a result of this, the
following discussion about how to use this snap-in to manage print
servers and printers will be concise and will cover only the following
tasks:
Launching Print Management
Installing the Print And Document Services role and its role
management tools results in a new page called Print Services being
added to Server Manager. (See Figure 3.) Using this
new page, you can do the following:
-
View printing-related events
-
Restart the Print Spooler service if needed
-
Start performance counters on the print server
-
View a list of installed role services for the Print And
Document Services role
You can also launch the Print Management console from the
Tools menu in Server Manager. When Print Management is opened on a
print server, the local host is visible in the console tree unless
it has been removed. You can add other print servers to the console
so that you can manage them by doing the following:
-
Right-click the Print Servers node, and select Add/Remove
Servers to open the Add/Remove Servers dialog box:
-
If the local server is not visible, click Add The Local
Server.
-
In the Add Servers text box, type the name of a remote
print server you want to manage, and click Add To List. You can
also browse for other print servers on the network.
-
Click OK when you are finished.
For example, Figure 4 shows Print
Management being used to manage two print servers:
The console tree of Print Management has the following
nodes:
-
Print Management This root
node allows you to add or remove print servers and to migrate
printers.
-
Custom Filters This node
allows you to quickly view all printers, all printer drivers,
all printers that are not ready to print, or all printers that
have pending print jobs. You can also use this node to create
new filters of your own for filtering printers or printer
drivers according to conditions you specify.
-
Print Servers This node
displays all print servers being managed by the console as
subnodes. You can also use this node to add or remove print
servers from the console as described previously.
-
<servername> Each
node that displays the name of a print server allows you to
manage the print server, add printers to it, and perform other
management tasks. Each print server node also has four subnodes
that allow you to view and manage printer drivers, printer
forms, printer ports, and printers.
-
Deployed Printers This node
allows you to view printers that have been deployed using Group
Policy.
The sections that follow provide more details for performing
some of these tasks.
