Planning Your Printing Operations

When you use Advanced Server for both file and print sharing, file operations have first priority. Printing transactions never slow access to files. Moreover, file operations have negligible impact on printers that are attached directly to the server; parallel and serial ports are always the greater bottlenecks. A dedicated print server may be desirable if a server is required to manage many frequently-used printers.

The decision to combine print and file servers may depend on security concerns. While printers always should be available to those persons using them, you may want to restrict physical access to file servers by keeping them in secured rooms.

One way to maximize use of print devices is to stagger printing times. For example, if printer traffic is heavy during the day, you can postpone printing of less important documents by routing them through a shared printer queue that prints only during off-hours.

To do this, use the Scheduling tab of the printer's Properties sheet to define the time during which a printer (shared printer queue) can print documents. When you specify printing times, the print spooler accepts documents at any time but it does not print to the destination print device until the designated start time. At the stop printing time, the spooler stops sending documents to the print device and saves any documents remaining until it is scheduled to start printing again.

For information on changing printer properties, see "Setting Properties for a Printer (Shared Printer Queue)" later in this chapter.

There may be times when you need to print a document immediately and want to bypass the documents waiting for a print device. You can do this by creating shared printer queues with different priority levels. (Print priority is set in the Scheduling tab of a printer's Properties sheet.) If two printers (shared printer queues) are associated with a single print device, documents routed to the shared printer queue with the highest priority level (highest number) print first.

To take advantage of this print priority system, create multiple shared printer queues that lead to one print device. Assign each shared printer queue a priority level, and then create a group of users that corresponds to each printer. For example, users in Group1 might have access rights to a Priority 1 shared printer queue, users in Group2 might have access rights to a shared printer queue with Priority 2, and so on. In this way, you can prioritize documents according to the users submitting their documents.

A printing pool consists of two or more identical print devices associated with one shared printer queue. To set up a pool, you add a printer (shared printer queue) using the Add Printer Wizard and assign it as many printers (output ports) as you have identical print devices. (Advanced Server places no limit on the number of printers in a pool.) Whichever print device is idle receives the next document. This configuration maximizes use of print devices while minimizing the amount of time users must wait for documents.

Printer pools have the following characteristics:

It is impossible to predict which print device in a pool will receive a particular document. However, if the Advanced Server Messenger Service is active, a workstation will receive messages indicating when documents are complete and identifying the print device by output port (printer name). Unless you want users to rely solely on these messages, it is a good idea to place pooled print devices in a single location.

A particularly flexible printer configuration is one in which a print device is accessible both in and outside of a printing pool, as shown in the following illustration. This configuration provides both the fast throughput of a printing pool and the flexibility of having more than one print device.