User Guide

16 Novell Distributed Print Services Administration Guide
Novell Distributed Print Services Administration Guide
103-000137-001
August 31, 2001
Novell Confidential
Manual 99a38 July 17, 2001
Tight Integration with eDirectory
Novell Distributed Print Services is designed to take full advantage of Novell
eDirectory. Integration with eDirectory allows you to create a single
eDirectory object—an NDPS Printer object—to represent each printer on the
network. As a Printer object, printers become as secure as the other objects in
the tree, and they are just as easy to manage.
In the eDirectory tree, printers can be conveniently grouped. For example, you
can group and manage all of your printers by department, workgroup, or
location. You can also search for printers with specific capabilities, because
those capabilities are properties of the NDPS printer object.
Automatic Printer Driver Download and End User Convenience
Not only does NDPS make printer management easier for you as an
administrator, it also makes printing easier for end users. NDPS provides a
database that includes drivers for most printers in common use today. From
this database, you can select drivers you want to be automatically installed on
client workstations when a user adds a printer. This eliminates the need for
users to provide the printer driver themselves. You can add drivers to this
database as they become available.
An NDPS client can also modify printer configurations. For example, a user
can configure a printer to use a different size paper or to print a cover page.
Users can change the properties of any installed printer that the administrator
has not locked. Also, using NDPS, users can view the current status of any
available printer to see how many print jobs are waiting to be printed before
they send their jobs. These NDPS features help make end-user printing easier
and more effective than the methods of the past.
Server
Workstation
Printer driver database
Add
drivers
Auto-download
drivers