In this video from ITFreeTraining, I will look at how Windows printing can be deployed
on your network. Windows allows the different components of printing to be separated quite
easily - giving the administrator a lot of different options on how to deploy printing
on their network.
To review what was covered in the previous video, there are essentially 4 parts of the
Windows printing process as shown. A single computer can perform all 3 roles with the
exception of the print device or they can be split apart and placed on different parts
of the network. I will now have a look at some of the different ways these components
can be distributed across the network.
The first method of printing is direct printing. This is when the computer is directly connected
to the print device. This is also known as a locally attached print device. In this case,
all the print components are configured on the local computer. The computer is connected
to the printer by a direct connection. Generally nowadays this will be a USB connection.
The next method I will look at is when Locally Attached Printer sharing is shared out on
the network. Like before, you have your computer that is directly connected to a print device.
On this computer the printer is installed locally which means the components, printer,
printer driver and printer server are present on this computer.
In some cases, the administrator may want to share a printer with other computers. For
example, in a small office environment there may not be a dedicated server installed and
thus a workstation is used to share the printer so that other computers on the network can
use it.
In this case, two other computers on the network use the shared printer on the workstation
using the network. When this occurs a printer needs to be installed on each computer. The
printer will receive the print job from the application running on the computer, but the
print job will need to be converted to a format the print device understands. Also, the computer
will need to know what features are available on the print device, for example, if it can
print double sided. In order to do this, the printer driver will also need to be installed
on the computer.
You can see the print server is only on the one computer. The print server on this computer
is responsible for managing the print jobs that are being sent to this print device.
If there are a lot of print jobs being sent to this print device, this can put additional
load on the computer which may affect anyone using that computer.
The next method of printer deployment that I will look at is network-attached printing.
Consider you have a printer that is directly connected to a standalone print server. In
the old days these generally were stand-alone units. If you have a stand-alone printer that
did not have network support you could use one of these devices to connect it to the
network.
Nowadays, this functionality is available in a lot of other devices. You can still purchase
a standalone print server; however some devices like routers also have this functionality
built in. Some physical printers also have expansion slots in them that allow a print
server to be installed, adding network functionality to the physical printer.
The standalone print server has a direct connection to the print device, however it is also connected
to the network. This allows the computer to print to the print device. Like before, the
printer and the printer driver need to be installed on the workstations.
There are some problems with this method. First there is no central administrative control.
This means that an administrator cannot view the print queue and delete jobs. If the device
allows it, they can login into the device and possibly have some control there, but
this is not as seamless as managing Windows printing. Since there is no central control,
there is also less feedback given to the users. For example, the user will not be able to
see what print jobs are already printing on the printer and thus have no indication of
when their print job will start or how many print jobs are ahead of them. They may also
not receive any error codes. For example, if the printer is out of paper this message
may only be received by the user whose current job is printing.
Lastly there is no print processing performed by the print server. In Windows you have the
option to move some of print processing to the server. However, with a print server,
all the processing needs to be done by the workstation.
A lot of printers on the market come with network support; however there are still some
times you may want to use a print server. For example, if the printer needs to be connected
to two networks (For example a commercial and secure network). If the printer only has
the one network connection, it is possible to have it connected to the second network
using a print server. If you want to do something like this or get some more control over your
print server, there is the next option.
The last option that I will look at is network attached printer sharing. This is when you
have your print device and computers all on the same network. The print device could have
its own network card or be connected to a stand-alone print server.
The printer is installed on the server, or on one of the workstations. The rest of the
computers will print to this server to access the print device. So essentially the 3 computers
in this example send their print jobs to the server. The server then prints directly to
the print device over the network. Since only the server is printing to the print device,
the administrator has complete control over the print device since they have control over
the server. Any information from the print device, like being out of paper for example,
will be sent to the server. The server will then send this information to the desktop
computer. By placing the printer on the one server or workstation, this eliminates all
the problems of the previous example and is generally the approach that most administrators
will use.
Well that covers it for the different solutions that are available for Windows printing. I
hope you have enjoyed this video and have found it useful and I hope to see you in more
videos from us. Until next time, thanks for watching.