situation – small network of 25 PC windows 7, two network (connected via network cable, dedicated fixed IP address) printers (Xerox WorkCenter 7120). Office divided in two parts, each part has its own printer, so people dont have to stand up and make more than ten steps to get their papers 🙂
problem – Xerox 7120 was not a good choice for us and is very maintenance intense, causing problems and outages. People have to be informed to use the other printer while the first one is offline, and BFU is yelling, that "it is too complicated" to choose another printer from the menu …
question – is it possible to have something like "failover" printing, like
PC in office 1 : try printer 1, if not available, print on printer 2
PC in office 2 : try printer 2, if not available, print on printer 1
automatic solution, no user imput required (well, some notice where it was actually printed would be nice) ? I tried to google for some solution, but most I've found was for Windows 2000, that scared me a little 🙂
Best Answer
You can create a printer pool of identical printers. Users print to the pool and the print comes out where ever is least busy. If a printer fails, it will print to whichever is available. You can find more information here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc757086(v=ws.10).aspx