Overview:
The getting out of hand printing expenses in a small business environment and the lack of proper monitoring of all printers usage was the reason for Deployment of Print Manager Plus - Network Enterprise Edition 2010 (PMP).

Customer needs: 

Printer - management, restrictions, cost control, report, and authentication.

User - notification, restriction, cost control, report, and authentication. (1)
Remote - printer and user (printing) administration and account control. 

All those needs were properly addresses by the PMP software.

Setup:

The small business environment had a mixed infrastructure of domain joined workstations (WS) and non-domain workstations. The domain joined WS used the Domain Server as printer server while the other WS’s used an workgroup Windows XP machine with Printer Server role installed. To add a twist in the setup the computer lab was using Freeze State software.

Deployment strategy and tweaks:

We first had to create a uniform environment by joining all WS to the domain.

The next step was to assign the Print Server role to the Windows XP machine and share all of its network printers.

Then we created domain sub-OU’s within an "OU which allowed us to assign the appropriate user rights and restrictions based on group membership. The PMP software can be installed on the domain controller, on a printer server, or even on a workgroup, desktop machine that has the printer server role which makes is very flexible for domain or for a workgroup environment. The PMP uses SQL database for the reporting capabilities which will be installed on the Printer Server or on a separate machine.

Deployment Notes:

We had to make sure that ports TCP-48100 and TCP-48101 are allowed by the firewall on ALL server and workstations that will be communicating with the PMP software (i.e. server, remote admin console, user agents)

For Remote Admin Console – we made sure that the user has admin rights (or local admin right to the PMP database)

For security, we created separate PMP administration account to limit access to the Admin control.

Due to the frequent change of the lab users, we had to automate the profile setup with automated printers’ deployment. The new default profiles did not install any printers by default. To automate the printers’ deployment we pushed the printer deployment via Group Policy (we used per user printer deployment) and we installed specific printers to the desired group. Good tutorial can be found in this source (2)

When deploying multiple printers as it was in our case, the push printer deployment via Group Policy might not assign the desired printer as a default. We had to push a logon script to assign a certain printer as a default printer. Microsoft KB 263226 can be used as a starting point. (3) To avoid possible conflicts in simultaneous execution of the push printer policy and the default printer assignment script via the same policy we added a time delay. The 40 seconds delay in the script made sure the printer drivers install had finished before assigning the allocated printer as default.

Resources:

(1) www.softwareshelf.com

(2) http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Deploying-Printers-Group-Policy-Windows-R2.html

(3) http://support.microsoft.com/kb/263226


Krasi Piskov