5. Using the Print Management Console
With printers added to the network, and print
servers added to the Print Management console, an administrator can now
begin to centrally view, manage, and administer the printers and print
servers. Some of the tasks that an administrator can perform from the
Print Management console are tasks that would otherwise require a
remote session to each print server, such as change printer ports, add
or modify forms, or view the status of printers whether the printers
are online or not. Other tasks are new to the Print Management console,
such as creating custom printer filters that allow multiple
administrators to view and manage selected printers based on their
site, rights, and roles.
Performing General Printer Administration Tasks
From within the Print Management console, the
administrator can perform general printer administration tasks. These
tasks include the following:
• Updating printer drivers—By
right-clicking the Drivers item in the Print Server section of the
Print Management console and choosing Manage Drivers, an administrator
can update or change the printer driver of a printer. This is rarely
done in a network environment, but sometimes when a new printer add-on,
such as an envelope feeder or expansion paper feeder or sorter, is
added a new printer driver is needed to support the new add-on.
• Managing forms—By
right-clicking the Forms item in the Print Server section and choosing
Manage Forms, an administrator can create and delete new forms to
support different size paper or to specify a custom letterhead paper
form.
• Additional configuration—Additionally
within this interface, an administrator can change the printer port
that a printer is attached to on a print server, define log settings,
and enable the function to have users notified when a print job has
successfully completed printing.
Creating Custom Filters
A unique function of the Print Management
console is the Custom Filters function that enables administrators to
group printers, typically for the purpose of distributing the
administration of printers in the environment. For large organizations
that might have multiple buildings, sites, and administration
boundaries of devices such as printers, the administrators can perform
a filter view to see only the printers that fit within their
administrative responsibilities.
First, to view all printers in the
environment, an administrator can click the All Printers section of the
Custom Filters section of the Print Management console. All the
printers for managed print servers will be listed here.
To create a custom printers view, follow these steps:
1. Right-click the Custom Filters View in the Print Management console, and choose Add New Printer Filter.
2. Type in a descriptive name for this filter view (such as All Printers in the Boston Site).
3. Check the Display the Total Number of Printers Next to the Name of the Printer Filter check box. Click Next.
4. In the Field
drop-down list, choose a field that will contain information that can
be filtered. In many cases, the print servers can be filtered because a
print server frequently services printers in a specific geography.
Alternately, organizations that entered in location information for
printers such as Building 11 would be able to filter for that
designation in a custom printer filter filtered by name. An example
might be Field=Location, Condition=Contains, Value=Boston. Click Next
to continue.
5. On the Set
Notification Options page, an administrator can note an email address
where the administrator would be notified on the status of events
related to the printers in the filter. You can also run a script. This
might include being emailed every time a printer is offline, or every
time a printer is out of paper. Enter in the appropriate email
information (email address, SMTP mail server to be used, and message
desired), or leave this section unchecked, and then click Finish.
By clicking the newly created filter, the
filter rule is applied, and the printers noted in the filter will be
displayed, as shown in Figure 2.
In this figure, notice that the environment contains five printers;
however, the filter is searching only for printers in Boston, and
therefore only three printers are displayed for this administrator to
view and manage.
Figure 2. Custom printer filter.
An almost unlimited number of
printer filters can be created to show different groupings of printers
to be managed or administered. Organizations have created custom
printer filters by printer manufacturer such as HP, Xerox, and Sharp or
by printer type such as laser, color laser, and plotter to be able to
view assets by make, model, or configuration. Printer filters can even
be created based on queue length and to run an automatic script to take
action in addition to notifying the administrator.
