Printer Management

G

Guest

I am using a Windows Server 2003 machine as a print server. I am wanting to
allow students in my school the ability to send a job to a printer, however I
do not want that job to print until a teacher aproves that job. How can I do
this?

Thanks,
David Erickson
(e-mail address removed)
 
B

Bruce Sanderson \(MVP Printing\)

If "approval" requires reading the document to be printed, that's not easy
to do because the spool file in the printer queue is in the coding language
understood by the printer which is not generally speaking, human readable -
even though the document is "text", it may be at least partly a raster image
in the spool file. There is no generic way to "reverse translate" these
spool files into the original text, except by sending it to the printer.

So, if the teacher is to read the document to "approve" it before it is
printed, have a process where the students send the documents (or a
hyperlink to the document) in email to the teacher (or some other process -
e.g. student copies their document to a specific folder on a server). Then,
the teacher can open the document in whatever product produced it (e.g.
Word, Excel, IE) and print it if it is approved.

If "approval" does NOT require reading the documents:
Pause the printer
when the teacher is ready to review the documents, have the teacher open the
printer's queue ("open the printer")
select all of the documents
click Document, Pause
select the "approved" document, right click and select "Resume"
remove the check mark from "Pause Printing"
wait until all the "approved" documents have printed, then Pause the printer
again
cancel any "not approved" documents in the printer's queue
 

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