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Deploying Print and Fax Services Lesson 4

Objectives

• Install, Configure and Manage Printers and

Fax Servers in Windows Server 2008.

Print Sharing

• Print device sharing is another one of the

most basic applications for which local area

networks were designed.

• Installing, sharing, monitoring, and

managing a single network print device is

relatively simple, but when you are

responsible for dozens or even hundreds of

print devices on a large enterprise network,

these tasks can be overwhelming.

Windows Print Architecture

• The Print Device is the actual hardware that

produces hard copy documents on paper or

other print media.

– Windows Server 2008 supports both local

print devices, which are directly attached to

computer ports, and network interface print

devices, which are connected to the network,

either directly or through another computer.


• The printer is the software interface through which

a computer communicates with a print device.

– Windows Server 2008 supports numerous physical

interfaces, including Universal Serial bus (USB),

IEEE 1394 (FireWire), parallel (LPT), serial (COM),

Infrared Data Access (IrDA), and Bluetooth ports;

– Windows Server 2008 supports network printing

services such as lpr, standard TCP/IP ports, and the

Internet Printing Protocol (IPP), which allows clients

to print via HTTP traffic, either over an intranet or via

the World Wide Web.


• A print server is a computer (or standalone device)

that receives print jobs from clients and sends

them to print devices that are either locally

attached or connected to the network.

• A printer driver is a device driver that converts the

print jobs generated by applications into an

appropriate string of commands for a specific print

device.

– Printer drivers are designed for a specific print

device and provide applications with access to all of

the print device’s features.

Locally-Attached Print Device

Sharing a Locally-Attached Printer

Printer Formats

• The printer driver creates a job file using one of two interim formats, as follows:

– Enhanced Metafile (EMF) — A standardized, highly portable print job format that is the default format used by the Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 print subsystems.

•The printer driver converts the application data into an EMF file, and the printer sends it to the print server, which stores it in the spooler.

•The spooler then uses the printer driver on the print server to render the job into the final PCL format understood by the print device.

Printer Formats

– XML Paper Specification (XPS) — A new, platform-

independent document format included with

Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista.

•Print job files use a single XPS format for their

entire journey to the print device.

Networked Printers

• With network-attached print devices, the

primary deployment decision that the

administrator must make is to decide which

computer will function as the print server.

• Each client processes and spools its own

print jobs, connects to the print device using

a TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) port,

and sends the jobs directly to the device for

printing.

Network-Attached Print Device with Multiple Print

Servers

Network-Attached Print Device with a Single-shared

Print Server

Network Sharing and Discovery

• Before you can share a printer on a Windows Server 2008 computer, you must enable the appropriate settings in the Network and Sharing Center, just as you have to do to share files and folders.

• To share printers, the following Network Sharing and Discovery settings must be turned on:

– Network Discovery

– Printer Sharing

Network Sharing and Discovery

Sharing a Printer

• Right-click the

printer and

select Sharing.

Additional Drivers

Printer Permissions

Standard Printer Permissions

Standard Printer Permissions

• By default, all printers assign the Allow Print permission to the Everyone special identity, which enables all users to access the printer and manage their own documents.

• Users that possess the Allow Manage Documents permission can manage any users’ documents.

• Managing documents refers to pausing, resuming, restarting, and cancelling documents that are currently waiting in a print queue.

• Windows Server 2008 provides a print queue window for every printer, which enables you to view the jobs that are currently waiting to be printed.

Viewing the Printer Queue

Deleting Print Jobs

• When managing documents, keep in mind that the commands accessible from the print queue window affect only the jobs waiting in the queue, not those currently being processed by the print device.

• The data already in the print device’s memory will be printed, even though the remainder of the job was removed from the queue.

• To stop a job that is currently printing, you must clear the print device’s memory (by resetting it or power cycling the unit), as well as clear the job from the queue.

Printer Priority

• In some cases, you might want to give

certain users in your organization priority

access to a print device so that when print

traffic is heavy, their jobs are processed

before those of other users.

• To do this, you must create multiple printers,

associate them with the same print device,

and then modify their priorities, as described

in the following procedure.

Printer Priority

Printer Scheduling

• Sometimes, you might want to limit certain

users’ access to a printer to specific times of

the day or night.

• After creating two printers, both pointing to

the same print device, you configure their

scheduling using the following procedure.

Printer Pool

• You can connect a single print server to

multiple print devices, creating what is called

a printer pool.

• On a busy network with many print clients,

the print server can distribute large numbers

of incoming jobs among several identical

print devices to provide more timely service

and fault tolerance.

Printer Pool

• To create a printer pool, you must have at least two identical print devices, or at least print devices that use the same printer driver.

• The print devices must be in the same location, because there is no way to tell which print device will process a given document.

• You must also connect all of the print devices in the pool to the same print server.

• If the print server is a Windows Server 2008 computer, you can connect the print devices to any viable ports.

Printer Pool

Print Services Role

• Installing the Print Services Role on the

computer provides additional tools that are

particularly useful to administrators involved

with network printing on an enterprise scale.

Print Services Role

Print Management Console

• The Print Management snap-in for MMC is an

administrative tool that consolidates the controls

for the printing components throughout the

enterprise into a single console.

• With this tool, you can access the print queues and

Properties sheets for all of the network printers in

the enterprise, deploy printers to client computers

using Group Policy, and create custom views that

simplify the process of detecting print devices that

need attention due to errors or depleted

consumables.

Print Management Console

Deploying Printers with Group Policy

• Configuring a print client to access a shared printer

is a simple matter of browsing the network or the

Active Directory tree and selecting the printer you

want the client to use.

• However, when you have to configure hundreds or

thousands of print clients, the task becomes more

complicated.

• One way to simplify the process of deploying

printers to large numbers of clients is to use Active

Directory.

Deploying Printers with Group Policy

• Clients running earlier versions of Windows,

including Windows XP and Windows Server 2003,

do not support automatic policy-based printer

deployments.

• To enable the GPO to deploy printers on these

computers, you must configure the systems to run

a utility called Push-Printer Connections.exe.

• The most convenient way to do this is to configure

the same GPO you used for the printer deployment

to run the program from a user logon script or

machine script.

Fax Server

• Sending faxes, receiving faxes, waiting for

faxes, and even walking back and forth to

the fax machine can be an enormous drain

on productivity in many organizations.

• Windows Server 2008 includes a Fax Server

role that enables users to send faxes from

and receive them to their desktops.

Fax Server

• The basic steps involved in setting up a fax

server are as follows:

1. Add the Fax Server role.

2. Add the Desktop Experience feature.

3. Share the fax printer.

4. Configure the fax device.

5. Configure incoming fax routing.

6. Designate fax users.

Fax Service Manager Console

• The Fax Service Manager enables

administrators to perform the following

tasks:

– View and configure fax devices, such as

modems.

– Specify routing policies for inbound faxes.

– Specify rules for outbound faxes.

– Manage fax users.

– Configure fax logging and archiving.

Fax Server Manager Console

Desktop Experience Feature

• To send and view faxes, you must use the Windows Fax and Scan program.

• Windows Fax and Scan is included with Windows Server 2008, but it is not installed by default.

• With other non-essential elements, such as desktop themes and Windows Media Player, Windows Fax and Scan is packaged as part of a single feature called Desktop Experience.

• The assumption is that most servers do not need these applications, and administrators would prefer not to have them installed unnecessarily.

Windows Fax and Scan

Sharing the Fax Printer

• When a client selects the Fax printer instead

of a standard printer, the print job goes to

the fax server instead of to a print server or

print device.

• While adding the role creates the Fax printer,

it does not share it.

• You must share the fax printer manually,

using the same procedure as you would in

sharing a printer.

Microsoft Fax Services Manager Console

Fax Modem Properties Sheet

Incoming Methods for Fax Device

E-Mail Tab of an Incoming Method’s Properties

Sheet

Global Incoming Routing Methods

Outbox Tab of the Fax Server Properties Sheet

Summary

• Printing in Microsoft Windows typically involves the

following four components: print device, printer,

print server, and print driver.

• The printer driver enables you to configure the print

job to use the various capabilities of the print

device.

• The simplest form of print architecture consists of

one print device connected to one computer,

known as a locally-attached print device. You can

share this printer (and the print device) with other

users on the same network.

Summary

• XML Paper Specification (XPS) is a new, platform-independent document format included with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, in which print job files use a single XPS format for their entire journey to the print device, rather than being converted first to EMS and then to PCL.

• With network-attached print devices, the administrator’s primary deployment decision is which computer will function as the print server.

Summary

• Printer permissions are much simpler than NTFS permissions; they basically dictate whether users are allowed to merely use the printer, manage documents submitted to the printer, or manage the properties of the printer itself.

• The Print Management snap-in for MMC is an administrative tool that consolidates the controls for the printing components throughout the enterprise into a single console.

Summary

• To use Active Directory to deploy printers to clients, you must configure the appropriate policies in a Group Policy Object (GPO).

• Windows Server 2008 includes a Fax Server role that enables users to send faxes from and receive them to their desktops.

• You must install the Print Services role before or with the Fax Server role.

• The fax server can route incoming faxes in three ways: route through email, store in a folder, or print.