How can we control the print jobs to network printers?

Question

What do we have?

One Windows 2003 Server with Active Directory
Several Windows XP Pro computers login with Active Directory users.
TCP/IP network through Linksys switch
Three network printers (connected directly to the LAN) from various manufactures.

What do we want?

To manage who can use what printer.
To track how many print request someone or group has made during certain period.
Create reports with totals, usage etc. for each printer.

Question .... how can we realize this?

Forgot to mention that we have a non-print-server printing environment. Meaning that users send the print job directly to the printer via the IP address of the printer, instead of having a shared printer on the print server.

Answer 1

Bostonian is right...

Since you have Active Directory....hell why not use it?

Print serving takes little power nowadays, so setup the print queue/share on the AD. Then build groups that can "use" the printer and "admis" that can manage the printer.

You then maybe able to set the printer so only the AD can print to it.

Change everone's driver to print to the queue and not direct.

It's the best way to control and audit with AD in the network....

It's why it's there....

Answer 2

If you're printing directly to the printers from the workstations you can't control printing at all.

If you set up print queues on a server and connect through the queues then you can control who can print to which printer an even limit the time of day that users can print. You can control that by user or through group membership. However in most cases you can't stop a user who has local admin access to his or her machine from setting up a direct connection to the IP address of the print server. Some print servers can limit the source IP address where the print job comes from to prevent that.

If you want reports you'll have to look into a third party software package for that.

Answer 3

You need to set up permissions on the printers, and only allow certain groups to print to them. Set up groups and add the users to the groups. You then put the groups to the printer that you want to give access to. To track who uses the printer, just look in the event viewer where the printer is installed, or your computer that you have as the printer server. Creating reports for totals and stuff, this is done by the printer, and I am not aware that Windows is able to do this.