Network Printers by SMB Path

When you install a printer in this manner, the printer has already been installed on a print server or server, the driver has been configured in the one place then the printer has been shared from that location so that anyone on the network can easily access it. This is very common in large business's with many employees. By installing with this approach, IT minimizes overall install time, and now you only have one point of failure, rather than having the printer and driver installed independently on serval pc's, that IT would have to support. If it's only installed in one place (print server) and it has a problem, once i fix the issue there printing is then restored to everyone. After you install the printer on a server you share it the use the syntax to connect to it as \\servername\printer name. You can even email a link to everyone within the organization to install it. The end user simply click's the link and they are prompted to install it with one click. Hope this makes sense.

actually this cleared up a few thing more me also, thanx!

IT Dude kind of mentioned this, but a major factor from the end user standpoint is that connecting to the SMB share usually means that you will not have to download/install/configure a driver. The driver will be automatically loaded to your workstation from the server.

In this situation, the print server was actually the printer and not a client. For example, \\RNP972416. When you connected you got a warning that the server does not have the correct print driver installed, etc...

I can see the advantages of sharing the print driver off of a print server, but why would a printer be installed in this manner where it is not going through a print server, but using the printer as the server?

I hope this question makes sense.

In that situation, I'll guess that it is simply inertia.

The IT person may simply be used to doing things that way and not have thought through doing it other ways.

It's funny, we deal with printing issues and setting up printers every single day, but IT people may only deal with it once every couple of months. We put a lot more thought into this than they usually do.

I can make the hyperlink look like anything, however only a Fiery or Creo controller has the ability to host a printer in the same sense that a print server does. \\ricohprinter can point to any shared network resource, but a ricoh mfp without one of the afore mentioned controllers can't stand alone as what you have mentioned. If the hyperlink is pointed at a shared printer on say a Win2003 server, but the client is a Vista PC you may very well get that message. The only other scenario would involve the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP), but that uses forward slashes (//) and is a diferent discussion altogether.