Information Systems:Domain Printers (Windows Shared Printers)

Though the laser printers around the office (Lexmark, Xerox) are network-enabled and can "share themselves", our formal way is to share the printers through SUPERSERVER (about to be retired) and FP-SRV-01, using Windows printer sharing and Deployed Printers (Group Policy).

Administration and Configuration

Printers are shared using "Universal" drivers (universal to the manufacturer, not to all printers). These are available through the manufacturer's website. These drivers should be installed and kept up to date on the print server (FP-SRV-01). There may be 2 drivers available: PostScript and PCL3. Between PostScript and PCL3, I'm undecided, so update this section if ever there is clarity as to which should be used. Being compatible with all printers, universal drivers may provide access to only a subset of features comapred to printer-specific drivers, but the trade-off is convenience of having to manage only 1 (again, per manufacturer).

When deploying new printers via GPO, consider the following:

• Deploy to the correct GPO. If it is a department-local printer, do not deploy it to the company-global GPO.
• Keep consistent with the naming convention of the current print shares.
• Set up the port using the printer's DNS name, not the IP.
• When adding printers to the server, the wizard may auto-install the printer-specific driver. Override this and change it to the universal driver.
• Set the default print mode to B/W if it's a color printer. This is done in Printing Preferences on the server.

Other Notes

• A note about the printers on Lucy - these are not printer shares, but rather, are network printers (the Lexmarks used for invoice printing at the picking stations) that is used by JetForm locally on Lucy. Best analogy is when your home computer connected to a LAN/WLAN-connected printer. This can be a point of confusion since these printers seem to be shared.