I know I'm a little late on this, but we have a pretty good setup here that works for us. We use Papercut (www.papercut.com<http://www.papercut.com>) for the print quota/restriction/reporting side of things, and Windows servers for the network printers. I'm actually in the middle of a migration from WS03 R2 print servers to a new failover print cluster we've created using WS08 R2 and the Papercut folks were very helpful to get the migration done and installed into the cluster (they support clustering as well, but need to update a few documents for WS08 R2). If you want to, you can assign different "costs" to different printers based on different options (color, duplexing, etc) to encourage people to print in a more cost-effective manner.
As for the queues, we have several AD groups for each of our schools, such as "Students", "Teachers", and "print operators" that contain different AD users. When we set up queues, everyone gets removed and just the groups that need it get applied. For kids in particular, this keeps them from printing outside of their school. Then, our AD structure has ous set up for computers based by location. So, it's something like: Schoolname --Computers ---Students ---Room1 ---Room2 ---Etc For student computer OUs (in the above example, it's at the "students" level), we have applied a printer preference policy that uses loopback policy processing, using the new GPO Preferences. By targeting the right ous and groups, this basically maps the printer(s) for that room when kids log onto those computers. You could also do something similar for teachers, depending on your structure. So, kids can add other printers if needed, but normally they don't have to. If a teacher does get a bunch of junk (or other stuff) printed to their printer, we can go to Papercut and produce a pdf of what was printed-basically you see who sent it. For color printers that kids need to print to, I usually set up the classroom teacher with print management rights, and teach them how to pause the queue. They keep the queue paused except when they actually want kids printing there, then they clear the jobs out and let them print and pause it again when done. The only other thing I will point out is that a lot of this revolves around structuring your AD. It works best in conjunction with locked-down machines and practically requires that all kids have their own AD accounts-generic accounts cause all sorts of grief. If people are admins or can run any program they want, they might just get around using your server for printing anyway. =) -Bonnie From: Kennedy, Jim [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, May 03, 2010 11:59 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Print Server suggestions I am just getting started, but so far the same permissions seem to apply for installing a printer connection from a print server as are needed to install the printer locally. Students don't have that ability, heck the teachers don't either. For exactly the reasons you describe. But again I am just starting to look at this and test but my regular limited account could not install a printer from my test print server. As to the other questions raised in a couple of other emails. We are looking to find out who is printing and how much. For example we know a teacher will walk up to the copier and scan a document to PDF. Then go back to her room and print a hundred of them, rather than copy a hundred of them at the copier which is much cheaper. Or they won't plan ahead and send them over to our full time printing shop which can do all of this much easier. So yes there is a reason for it and it is a mandate from management. As for going 100 percent electronic, we have done an outstanding job of that. Most testing is electronic for example. But 100 percent electronic is a pipe dream. It is a light at the end of the tunnel that you can and should keep chasing. But the reality is people do need to print from time to time. From: Jonathan Link [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, May 03, 2010 2:52 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Print Server suggestions When I worked in a high school, an advantage to not using a print server at the time (NT 4 and Win 2000) was the fact that I could localize printing to the room the computer is in very easily, by limiting which printers were installed on the computer. To my knowledge, there isn't anyway to do that with a Windows print server and printer sharing. Oh, and it became quite important to localize printing when I had some students printing to other rooms when they weren't in that room. -Jonathan On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 2:42 PM, Kurt Buff <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 10:48, Kennedy, Jim <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > I hate to toss such a generic question out there but I have zero experience > in this > area. We are putting up a new building this summer, replacing our larges which > would be the High School. We have always just used network attached printers > and > let the users run free. Less hassle for us but probably not the most cost > effective way > to do it. So I am thinking 2008 R2 print server and some sort of usage > monitoring software. > > Any ideas on suggested software to monitor all of this, or any ideas on a > better design? Not trying to be facetious or rude - just trying to stimulate some thought. This is a high school; can we make the assumption that everyone has a computer, and most likely a portable? Why print? Why not keep everything electronic? It *would* be a radical move, and probably not easily accepted by some of the older staff, but I think in this specific environment, unless there are regulatory requirements for it, this might be a useful approach. 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