How Does a Print Server Work?

Setting up the Print Server

Many large corporations and small businesses share printers between employees who work in the same office. The easiest way to do this is with a printer server, which is a separate workstation that is devoted to hosting the office's printers. Normally, a server operating system is installed on the print server computer and then the office's various printers can be added to the system with the appropriate drivers. The new printers are then set up to be shared from the print server, so that employees can access them from their individual workstations.

Adding a Printer at a Workstation

Once the necessary printers and drivers have been installed on the main print server, the employee workstations have to be configured to connect to the server. Printers are added through the "Printers & Faxes" control panel, where you are prompted to enter the IP address of the print server and the queue name for the individual printer. After the office printers are added to a workstation, you can designate one networked printer to be their default printer, which will be the first option that appears in all printing dialog boxes.

Printing on the Network

When you print a document to a networked printer, your computer first connects to the print server through a network connection. The print server receives the request and then directs the print job to the queue that the user has designated. The job is again sent through a network connection and arrives at the specified printer before being processed.

Administering a Print Server

Although print servers allow for users to print documents without being directly connected to either the server or the printer, sometimes it is necessary to work directly on the print server, especially when troubleshooting is required. From the print server, an administrator can also add or delete a printer and check to see if a document has been successfully sent to a printer or not.