The only thing that I can find that comes close is "Printer Location
Tracking" in AD, but that doesn't really do what you want to do.
There's no automatic way of having it print to the "nearest" printer,
since physical distance is not a factor in IP Networks.
Tharin Olsen wrote:
Hey guys, just began a new project this week and I thought I'd try and pick the
brain of the collective. I'm going to be helping out a small charter school in
my town and need to get most of their IT needs in order and very quickly. They
received some generous grants and bought lots of desktops and laptops and what
not but it has not been rolled out in an organized fashion yet. No domain,
active directory, group policies, antivirus protection, web filtering, etc. As
usual I come into the picture after all or most of this money has been spent
and the equipment has already been purchased. ::sigh::
One interesting problem is that the teachers each have their own laptop and
they go from classroom to classroom. The students stay put. I informed the head
of the faculty that I will need to install the drivers and what not for the
network printers onto each of the teachers laptops so that the teachers can
start printing. Since the teachers move around they won't be printing to the
same printer all the time, they will need to print to the one that is
physically closer to them. I figured I would just install the printers and name
them based on their physical location. When a teacher would need to print
something, they would choose the appropriate printer from their printer list
first then hit the print button. Simple, yes? Well they think this might be too
complicated for their teachers. They want to hit print and automagically have
the computer route the print job to the nearest printer instead. I have no idea
how to do this.. well I suppose one could
have something that sensed which wireless access point their notebook was connected to then based on that route it to the nearby printer but I still wouldnt know how to do that...
So have any of gurus on here done something like this? Or should I tell them to
suck it up and learn how choose a printer from the six that are available? :)
-Tharin Olsen
