On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 2:41 PM, Steven Peck <[email protected]> wrote:
> What are you trying to monitor and why?  If you have no management
> mandate to monitor and no overall objective to monitor, then you are
> creating work for yourself that is unnecessary and will not get done.

  Mr. Peck makes a good point.

> Generally using a print server should be there to centralize access to
> print resources.  This can increase ease of use with users and over
> time reduce support calls if all goes well.

  I also recommend using a print server for management and reliability reasons.

  Management: You can pause queues for trouble-shooting.  You can
disable a queue if a printer is going to be down for a while (avoiding
a queue with a weeks worth of stalled jobs).  Centrally install/update
printer drivers.  If a printer model changes, update the driver on the
queue, and everyone gets the change automatically.  Plus, if you ever
do need to deploy

  Reliability: In my experience, everybody printing direct to the
printers tends to be more likely to lead to lost or corrupt jobs.  I
think it's just because printers aren't always smart about arbitrating
contention.  By having everyone print through a central print server,
things are bit less erratic.

  And I avoid host-attached printers whenever humanly possible.
Combined with roaming profiles, it means when you swap out a dead PC,
the user gets their printers back like nothing happened.  :)

-- Ben

~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~
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