Allocating Printers

[Guest]

Just wanted to get a feel for what could be done...

Basically I work in a school where we have around 30 printers. We have 6 IT
rooms and only want certain printers to be available in certain rooms, as the
children find it amusing to print thier work to rooms all over the school.

At present the current IT staff have the printers configured to the PC's in
the appropriate IT rooms using a batch files...but in my opinion this isnt
practical and running scripts all over the place does load down the network.

Is thier a offical microsoft way for users that need to use differant rooms
around the site, but only have access to certain printers depending on the
room they are in???

Im told this might be achieved through group policy, but im not exactly sure
how.

Any advice/opinions would be helpfull

cheers

 

[Chuck]

Just wanted to get a feel for what could be done...

Basically I work in a school where we have around 30 printers. We have 6 IT
rooms and only want certain printers to be available in certain rooms, as the
children find it amusing to print thier work to rooms all over the school.

At present the current IT staff have the printers configured to the PC's in
the appropriate IT rooms using a batch files...but in my opinion this isnt
practical and running scripts all over the place does load down the network.

Is thier a offical microsoft way for users that need to use differant rooms
around the site, but only have access to certain printers depending on the
room they are in???

Im told this might be achieved through group policy, but im not exactly sure
how.

Any advice/opinions would be helpfull

cheers

Caz,

Do you have a domain, or a workgroup? The best way to administer, and restrict,
printer usage is with Active Directory, but this will require a domain under
Server 2000 or 2003. With AD, you can associate printers (and other resources)
by location, by user, or both.

Active Directory takes a lot of work to start, but if you have 30 printers
scattered over 6 rooms (and how many students?), I would recommend it.

 

[Guest]

Chuck

Sorry i should have been more clear..we have a Wndows 2000 domain and xp pro
workstaions, an active directory is in place, but to be honest we mainly just
use it to manage user accounts...when it comes to printers we could use some
direction.

We have around 1200 users. Associating printers by user wouldnt be ideal as
the idea is to stop the kids printing from 1 IT room to a printer in another
room.

thanks

Caz

 

[Malke]

Chuck

Sorry i should have been more clear..we have a Wndows 2000 domain and
xp pro workstaions, an active directory is in place, but to be honest
we mainly just use it to manage user accounts...when it comes to
printers we could use some direction.

We have around 1200 users. Associating printers by user wouldnt be
ideal as the idea is to stop the kids printing from 1 IT room to a
printer in another room.

Caz - Sure you can do this with AD the way Chuck suggested. Certainly
you don't want to have 1200 different user accounts! The way we handle
user accounts in our school (admittedly it is a smaller school than
yours and is K-8) is to make an account called "Student". Then all the
kids log on as Student. For the laptop program where we have a similar
setup as yours (smaller scale) where we've got printers in various
different rooms, we do a couple of useful things. First, the kids are
logging on as Student. Second, when we configure the laptops we make
the MS Document Printer the default printer. This forces the kids to
choose the printer, which have names like Room6, Room20, etc. And
third, we have a lot of control over our kids and they are taught at
the beginning of the year how to print. If they fool around and print
to the wrong printer, we have the ability to set consequences so they
don't do it again.

Maybe some of this will help you.

Malke

 

[Chuck]

Chuck

Sorry i should have been more clear..we have a Wndows 2000 domain and xp pro
workstaions, an active directory is in place, but to be honest we mainly just
use it to manage user accounts...when it comes to printers we could use some
direction.

We have around 1200 users. Associating printers by user wouldnt be ideal as
the idea is to stop the kids printing from 1 IT room to a printer in another
room.

Caz,

I was hoping that you had Active Directory - with a setup as large as yours,
you'd be dumb not to. You've got 1/2 of the work already done.

With AD, you can set relationships by computers as well as users. This is
called Group Policy. So just setup a GP relationship between computers (grouped
by room), and printers (also grouped by room).