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tip When you cancel a user’s print job, the user is not informed of the cancellation. In other words, a “printer error” message is not returned to the user. You have to inform the user that the job has been cancelled, although the user can look in the print queue and see that the job is no longer waiting in the queue.

Setting Print Schedules and Priorities

Besides managing the print queue, there are a few other management options that you should be aware of. If you right-click a shared printer’s icon in the Printers And Faxes folder, you can open its properties dialog box. If you then select the Advanced tab, you see a number of printer options, as shown in Figure 14-8. In terms of networking, the important aspects of this tab are the scheduling and priority settings, described next.

Figure 14-8. The Advanced tab of a printer’s properties dialog box allows to you to configure schedules and priorities.

Establishing printer schedules Notice at the top of the dialog box that by default the printer is always available to users. However, you might want to limit the shared printer’s availability. To do so, select the Available From option, and then select the hours of operation that the printer should be available. Keep in mind that this setting affects all users including network users and users logged on locally—even you. Unless a local user has administrative privileges to modify the schedule as needed, the local or network user can only use the printer during the specified hours of operation.

The schedule option can be useful, but because it uniformly applies to all local and network users, it might not be practical. For example, you might want the printer to be available only to you from 8:00 A.M. to 10:00 A.M. each day, but you want network users to be able to use the printer after 10:00 A.M. You can do this by setting up more than one share for the same physical printing device, as described in the steps that follow. To

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understand how this works, you need to understand that when you install a printer, the software that Windows XP uses to run that printer is also installed. This computer and software combination is collectively called the printer. In contrast, the physical printing machine that sits on your desk is called a print device. The terms can be misleading, but the important point is that you control sharing at the level of the printer (the software configuration), not the printing device. This means you can configure multiple printers for the same physical print device, and each printer’s configuration can meet different needs.

The easiest way to understand the use of multiple printers is to consider a step-by-step example. After reading these steps, you might want to implement a similar configuration on your network.

tip The only way to use different schedules on the same printer is to create multiple shares, each of which prints to the same print device. You cannot assign schedules to users or groups in Windows XP Professional, but you can use different printers and alter the configurations as needed.

1From the computer to which the printer is attached, open the printer’s properties dialog box, and stop sharing the printer. To do this, select Do Not Share This Printer on the Sharing tab and click Apply.

2Select the Advanced tab, and make sure the Always Available option is selected.

3Create a second printer, also called a virtual printer, for your printing device. Choose File, Add Printer in Printers And Faxes, and follow the wizard. You can use the existing driver, and you’ll be prompted for a share name for the new printer.

4Open the virtual printer’s properties dialog box. On the Sharing tab, confirm the printer’s share name you entered in the wizard. Click Additional Drivers to install drivers for other versions of Windows if needed.

5Select the Advanced tab. Select Available From, and set the hours that you want the printer to be available to network users. Click OK.

Now you have two printers installed for the same print device. The first printer is for you (and other local users) and is available all the time, but not shared on the network. The second (virtual) printer is for shared network use and is only available during the hours you have specified.

note During the time period that a printer is not available to network users, users can still send print jobs to the printer queue, but they are not printed until the printer becomes available according to the schedule.

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Assigning printer priorities Consider this situation: You are the administrator of a printer connected to a Windows XP computer. The documents that you print are often very important and need to be printed quickly for clients. However, because the printer is shared, your documents often end up waiting in the print queue. You need to make your documents print faster than other users’ documents. The way to accomplish this is to assign priorities.

The priority of a print job determines its order in the print queue. High-priority print jobs are serviced before low-priority print jobs, and this ensures that high-priority files are printed first. By default, each printer is configured with a priority of 1. This default value is the lowest priority, but because there is only one printer, the priority value doesn’t matter. However, if you have set up two or more printers for the same print device (as described in “Establishing Printer Schedules,” page 408), you can configure different priorities. This configuration is only effective on Windows XP Professional computers where you can assign different users and groups to different printers, thus creating the desired priority structure. In Windows XP Home Edition (or if Simple File Sharing is being used), you cannot differentiate between permissions for network users and groups, so the priority feature isn’t beneficial.

When you create multiple printers, the printer with the lower priority number has the least amount of priority. Consider this example: In a certain network environment, a Windows XP Professional computer has three shared printers (for the same printing device). One share is configured for the Administrators group with a priority of 75. The second share is for a marketing team and has a priority of 50. The third printer share is for all general users and has a priority of 1. The administrators’ print jobs will be moved ahead in the print queue over marketing and general users, and marketing print jobs will be moved ahead of the general users.

Managing the Print Spooler

The print spooler is a program that holds print jobs in a location on your computer’s hard disk until they are printed. If you select the Advanced tab on a printer’s properties dialog box, you’ll see the default spool settings. These options enable you to use the spooler or not and to start printing immediately or wait until the last page is spooled. Usually, you should use the print spooler, and you should always use it in a networking situation. If you disable spooling, users’ print jobs must remain on their computers until the printer is ready for them, which causes applications to pause during the printing process until the printer is ready to print their documents. On a heavily used printer, this delay can become unacceptable. For the fastest printing results, select the Start Printing Immediately option so that printing starts as quickly as possible.

On occasion, the print spooler might hang or lock up due to a faulty print request or a bug in the printer driver. When this happens, the printer will become unresponsive to network printing requests, even though the printing device might be functioning

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perfectly. It’s normally sufficient to simply restart the Print Spooler service by following these steps:

1From the Start menu, choose Administrative Tools, Services.

2Scroll through the list of services until you find Print Spooler.

3Right-click Print Spooler, and choose Restart. This will cause the document that was being processed when the print spooler hung to be lost, but all other documents in the queue will continue to print normally.

note The print spooler folder is located in %SystemRoot%\System32\Spool\Printers. (The environment variable %SystemRoot% resolves to the Windows XP installation folder, which by default would be C:\Windows.)

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Managing Print Server Properties

When you share a network printer, you can also configure a few other options that might be helpful to you by accessing the Print Server Properties dialog box. In the Printers And Faxes folder, choose File, Server Properties. The following list explains the options the Print Server Properties dialog box provides:

●Forms. On the Forms tab, shown in Figure 14-9, you can configure the forms and paper sizes for the printer to use. You can also create new custom forms and specify their size. This setting is helpful in situations where users need to print on custom business forms.

Figure 14-9. The Forms tab allows you to specify custom forms that can be used.

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●Ports. The Ports tab lists all available ports on the computer. You can add, delete, and configure ports on this tab.

●Drivers. The current printer drivers installed on the computer are listed on the Drivers tab, shown in Figure 14-10. You can easily add, remove, and replace drivers from this tab, and check their properties.

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Figure 14-10. The Drivers tab lists the currently installed drivers.

●Advanced. The Advanced tab, shown in Figure 14-11, contains information about the print spooler folder and some additional settings. You can choose to log print spooler errors and warnings. You can also choose to send informational notifications, which are pop-up messages that appear in the notification area, for local and network printers. In addition, you can set notification options to use for downlevel clients—those running earlier versions of Windows.

Figure 14-11. Print spooler settings and informational notifications are managed on the Advanced tab.

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Using a Separator Page

You might want to use separator pages with a shared network printer. The separator page prints between each print job so that users can more easily distinguish their print jobs from those of other users. Open the printer’s properties dialog box, select the Advanced tab, and click the Separator Page button. In the Separator Page dialog box that appears, click Browse. Windows XP opens to the location of the four default separator pages included in Windows XP:

●Pcl.sep. This separator page switches the printer to Printer Control Language (PCL) and prints a separator page that includes the account name, job number, date, and time.

●Sysprint.sep. This separator page switches the printer to PostScript, and then prints a separator page that includes the account name, job number, date, and time.

●Pscript.sep. This separator page switches the printer to PostScript, but does not actually print a separator page.

●Sysprtj.sep. This separator page is the same as Sysprint.sep, but it uses Japanese fonts if they are available.

The separator pages are text files that you can open with any text editor. They consist of printer language code that tells the separator page how to print, as shown in Figure 14-12. You can modify any of these pages to meet your needs, or you can create your own separator pages if you know the printer language. See Microsoft Windows XP Inside Out by Ed Bott and Carl Siechert (Microsoft Press, 2001) for more information about customizing separator pages.

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Figure 14-12. This separator page uses PostScript code to insert an informational page between print jobs.

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Creating an Internet Printer

Windows XP supports the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP), which allows Windows XP to share a printer over the Internet or an intranet, or connect to an Internet or intranet printer. To share an Internet or intranet printer on Windows XP, the computer to which the printing device is attached must be running IIS, which is only supported in Windows XP Professional. Therefore, if you are using Windows XP Home Edition, you can connect to an Internet or an intranet printer, but you cannot share a printing device connected to your computer.

If you want to share an Internet printer, you must first install and set up IIS. See Chapter 9, “Using Internet Information Services,” to learn more about setting up IIS. Once IIS is set up and configured, the printers that you share on the Windows XP Professional computer automatically become available through IPP as long as IIS is running. Essentially, this means that users can use Microsoft Internet Explorer to connect to your computer and access any shared printers by typing http://hostname/printers, where hostname is the name of the Windows XP Professional computer running IIS and sharing the printer or printers. For example, users on a LAN can access shared printers on a Windows XP Professional computer named Writer by typing http:// writer/printers. Figure 14-13 shows the Web page listing the name and status of the shared printer on the Writer computer.

Figure 14-13. Using IIS and IPP, users can access a printer through a Web browser.

A user can click the printer link and view the printer queue in a Web browser format, as shown in Figure 14-14. Similar to using a typical print queue, users have the right to see the print queue and cancel or pause their own print jobs, but not the print jobs of others. Those with an administrator account on the local machine can manage the entire print queue.

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Figure 14-14. Users can view and manage their print documents using an HTML print queue.

Users can also click the Properties link under View in the left pane to obtain more information about the printer, such as its speed, color capability, and resolution, as shown in Figure 14-15.

Figure 14-15. Users can view a shared printer’s properties through the HTML interface.

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tip You can view the entire list of available printers on a computer by typing http:// hostname/printers. But if you know the name of the printer you want to use, you can access it directly by typing http://hostname/printers/printername/.printer, where printername is the shared name of the printer.

Although you can access an Internet printer using Internet Explorer, you can also add the Internet printer to your Printers And Faxes folder so that it becomes an option you can print to from any Windows application. To install an Internet printer in either Windows XP Professional or Windows XP Home Edition, follow these steps:

1Open Printers And Faxes from the Start menu or from Control Panel.

2Click Add A Printer under Printer Tasks in the left pane, or choose File, Add Printer.

3When the Add Printer Wizard appears, click Next.

4On the Local Or Network Printer page, select the option labeled A Network Printer, Or A Printer Attached To Another Computer, and click Next.

5On the Specify A Printer page, select Connect To A Printer On The Internet Or On A Home Or Office Network. Enter the URL in the format shown here.

6You might be prompted to choose an account or enter a specified account if the printer’s folder is password protected. Enter any necessary information on the Configure Internet Port page of the wizard, shown on the next page, and click Next.

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7Complete the wizard. You might also be prompted to select a driver for the printer if you are using an earlier version of Windows.

Whenever you print a document from a Windows application after the printer

is installed, the Internet printer will be listed along with any local printers or network printers.

Internet Printing in the Corporate Environment

On a home or small office network, Internet printing might not seem like a very valuable feature. However, imagine that your computer is part of a corporate network of thousands of computers where an intranet is used. Instead of the usual network methods of accessing printers, Internet printing gives users an easier way to access the printer through the intranet using a simple HTML interface.

Or, consider another use: Suppose your network consists of one Windows domain with offices in three geographically distant locations. You travel frequently between these locations, and you produce a number of documents that must be disseminated often. Sure, you can e-mail the document to a colleague, but you can also simply send the document directly to an Internet printer available through IIS. If you are in Tampa and the printer is in Seattle, you can access the printer server and print directly over the Internet, making your work directly available to people who are thousands of miles away. Internet printing is a powerful feature that can meet your networking needs in many ways.

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