I'm looking for the best way to centrally administer (and track!) printing for our AD domain. I know Windows Server can be configured to be a "Print Services" server, but it's my understanding that this is simply to centralize queues, and doesn't really do accounting and reports (who printed what, when, how often, etc).
Our printers range from basic USB local printers (that may or may not be shared to nearby cubicles), classrooms with dedicated Win7 x86 boxes that sit in the corner and act as print servers (not attached to any individual machines, because many machines dual boot OSX and Windows Vista or Win7), and larger 'Big Copiers' that sit on the network natively.
Since being hired there recently I've begun publishing the shares into a standardized format in AD, but the system is pretty unorganized. I'd like to have a central print server that every box reports queues to, and that users can go to find any printer on the network when they want to add a printer to their machine (or I want to deploy to them via group policies).
I have spare Windows 2008 servers at my disposal to use if the Print Services thing is the way to go, or I'm comfortable building up a Linux CUPS box or whatever. I'm starting to dig around into how would be best to approach this, but figured this would be posted in the meantime if anyone wants to throw 2 cents in in the meantime.
Thanks.
Best Answer
Windows and Active Directory do not natively provide any good way to handle auditing/reporting of print queues. Administration, however, is pretty easy, and it's completely built-in.
Some agencies use central print queue servers, but it's discouraged by many sysadmins. I personally prefer to have one or two print queue servers per building. Publishing printers in active directory is a great way to make installing printers on clients a breeze. Users can select "Add Printer", "Find Now", and it will automatically list all of the printers in the directory or all of the printers in their current site, depending on how you have group policy, sites and services, and the print queues configured.
I've also found that it's far easier to manage print queues when there are no network printers directly installed (using TCP/IP). We've instituted a policy that our network printers are to always have a queue created on a server, and then clients connect to that queue.
While I do prefer to use Linux for some things, print queue hosting isn't one of them. If you're using Windows clients to print, use a Windows server or client to host the queue.