Note: This document is based on the original spoken WebCast transcript. It has been edited for clarity.

Heidi Moeller: Hello and welcome to the Microsoft WebCast Program. We'd like to thank all of you for joining us today. Our topic will be "An Overview of the New Printing Features in Microsoft^® Windows^® 2000," and our presenter will be Wally Eastland. I'm Heidi Moeller and I'll be your host for today's session.

We'll start this session with Wally's presentation, and follow that up with a question-and-answer period when the presentation is finished. We only answer questions submitted for the Support WebCast during the live event.

I would now like to take a moment to introduce Wally. Wally Eastland is the Technical Lead for the Washington Printing and Performance Team of Premier Support. He has worked as an independent computer consultant, a network administrator, and an IS manager. Prior to coming to Microsoft, he installed and supported high-speed network printing systems for major document solutions corporations.

Thank you so much for joining us today, Wally.

Wally Eastland: Let look at the slides. The first slide is just an overview of the changes and improvements in printing for Windows 2000. I'm going to focus on four topics, which are: client access; printer management; Standard Port Monitor, which is the new default printing port for Windows 2000; and Internet printing.

Slide 3 goes into client access changes. There have been a number of changes to how clients access printing in Windows 2000. Some of them are listed on the slide. Users can set personal document defaults. This meant, in Windows NT^® 4.0, that you installed a printer, and the administrator set up the document default on that printer. Users changed that information on a one-time basis. You opened a document in Word, clicked on File, Print, and changed the default settings for that particular document. After you printed that document, you closed down Word and logged off of your computer. When you logged back on, and went back in, you got the defaults that were set by the administrator. Under Windows 2000, you can go in and set up your own personal defaults, and these will stick.

Users can install printers across the Internet or intranet. That is a very cool feature of Windows 2000 printing and Internet printing, which we will go into a little bit more extensively later on in the discussion.

But, essentially, you can connect to a print server via a browser, choose the printer you want to use, and add that printer directly across the intranet. And you can also do it across the Internet, using VPN and other technologies, which allow you to come in and select printing. Depending on how things are set up and who chooses to use it, there are even features that will allow you to connect to printers at document companies, like copy shops, for example.

Printers are published in the Active Directory™. Active Directory for Windows 2000 lets us track users and resources, such as printer's files, and have those published so that they can be found. For example, Active Directory lets users find printers by feature.

Say you want to find a duplex printer, meaning a printer that prints on both sides of the page. You could do a search in the Active Directory for printers that have that feature, and you'll get a list of those. You can search by location or by printer name. When you create a new printer on a Windows 2000 print server, that printer will publish itself to the Active Directory, and it will become an object in that print server's container.

Supported drivers are included for the following operating systems: Windows^® 98 and 95, Windows 2000 Professional, and Windows NT 4.0. And what that basically means is that, if Microsoft provided a driver for a particular printer on an operating system, such as an HP 5Si driver on Windows 95 or 98, or on Windows NT 4.0, that driver is on the Windows 2000 Server CD-ROM. So, you can set up your printer to support different client operating systems.

Additionally, we provide a tool on that CD that will help with troubleshooting issues in mixed environments. For example, we have a number of printers that came out after the Windows NT 4.0 CD came out, and were not supported on the CD, but they are heavily used printers, such as the HP 4500, for example. And we provide support for about 60 of those printers in a utility called FixPrnSv.exe. That's also included on the Windows 2000 Server and Advanced Server CD-ROM, and I think it's also on the Windows 2000 Professional CD-ROM.

If you search the CD for that particular utility, you'll find it; you can either run it from the CD, or if you have copied the information into a flat directory on the server, you can run it from that directory. It will check to see if there are any printers that are attached to the server that need to have Windows NT 4.0 drivers that are not on the CD. It will load a supported driver for a specific printer on that list of about 60 printers. If the printers are not on that list, then you'll need to go to the vendor to get a driver for either Windows 2000 or Windows NT 4.0, depending on which environment you're looking at.

Printer management: the most important change to printer management is that spooler operations in print jobs are now included in System Monitor, which is the new performance monitor that comes in Windows 2000. And there are a variety of counters that are available for monitoring, when you're doing system monitoring for performance, and for baselining a server.

Just some examples: you can track the number of bytes printed per second, job errors, print jobs, jobs that are spooling, the maximum number of jobs on a spool, and a variety of others. If you open System Monitor and choose Spooler, you'll be able to see that. It's a very effective tool. In the past, we've had a lot of problems with spooler hangs and not knowing how many jobs have been printed; this gives us a tool to actually monitor that kind of operation.

Another very exciting change in Windows 2000 Server is the Microsoft Management Console. We can — not just in printing, but also network management tasks — set up the MMC console so that you can save administration settings, give access to any person you want to allow to administer printers, and they can administer printers from anywhere on the network, on a Windows 2000 computer.

Standard Port Monitor is the Windows 2000 replacement for LPRMON. LPRMON is still a part of Windows 2000, and is still available, because there are some reasons we may need to use LPR. But we prefer Standard Port Monitor, and it is very effective. It's a TCP/IP protocol; it provides support for most TCP/IP-capable printers, although there are some that are not supported.

For example, some that are not specifically supported are some of the older network cards, the older HP JetDirect or Axis network cards, also Lexmark network cards. It may be possible to do a firmware upgrade on those cards, and get them to be supported by Standard Port Monitor. In some cases, they won't be, and you'll need to use LPR or one of the third-party monitors that are available. Standard Port Monitor allows us to use Internet printing, and provides a Web interface for checking printer status, which I'll talk about little bit more down the road.

Also, Standard Port Monitor allows us to have more than 1,000 printers per print server. While we never really stated under Windows NT 4.0 that there was an upper limit to the number of printers, we have found that, if you get to around 900 or more printers on an individual server, you start seeing registry corruption. And that can create a lot of problems. Standard Port Monitor will alleviate the majority of those issues.

Let's go to Standard Port Monitor SPM Protocol Support. The SPM protocol relies on TCP/IP, like I said; it becomes part of the Windows 2000 TCP/IP protocol stack. It includes two printing protocols. The first is port 9100, which I'll talk about a little bit more in a minute, and there's also the line printer protocol, or LPR. It uses Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to gather printer status information, and it uses TCP/IP ports above 1024, which is another issue that we had with Windows NT 4.0.

It defaulted to an RFC specification that only allowed 10 TCP/IP ports. We had problems where a lot of printers were receiving a lot of print jobs, and stalling after 10 jobs. This alleviates that issue without having to go in and edit the registry, which was the fix that we had in Windows NT 4.0.

Port 9100: this is a protocol that was developed by Hewlett-Packard, and that has been widely accepted by other vendors; it's a very simple protocol. It sends raw PDL, and it uses ports above 9100. One of the advantages of port 9100 is that it closes the port when it's done. We had in Windows NT 4.0, as I'm sure everyone knows, a number of issues with spooler hangs; sometimes it was caused by bad drivers, sometimes it was caused by ports not being closed, handles being left open, and then you would get a leak in the spool.

By having port 9100 close those ports when it's done, we are much less likely to have those kinds of spool leaks. Also, it uses different ports above 9100; it starts at 9100 and goes up. This allows better support of multiport external network cards.

Let's go on to LPR, which is RFC 1197. LPR must remain in Windows 2000 printing for a couple of very specific reasons. It is the standard UNIX printing protocol, and it's required for printing to UNIX systems. It's also required if you're using clustering services, and the spooler is going to be on the virtual server. Basically, clustering only supports LPR in Windows NT 4.0 and in Windows 2000.

In fact, if you're going to use clustering, there are a couple of very good articles about setting up printing on a cluster. These are Knowledge Base articles; the first number is Q197046, "How to Set Up a Print Spooler on Microsoft Cluster Server," and the second is Q228904, "Print Spooler Support on Microsoft Windows 2000 Server Cluster."

It's very important to use LPR and very important to follow those two articles if you're using a cluster, or using clustering services. A lot of problems with Windows Cluster printing can be solved by going through those two articles.

Finally, Windows 2000 LPR uses ports above 1024 as well; this is where we depart from the RFC somewhat. The RFC states, as I said before, that you use ports 721 to 731 for printing. That doesn't work very well when you have a printer that is printing hundreds of jobs an hour, because you will get 10 jobs in the queue printing, with other jobs backing up, and then you'll see 10 jobs move on through again. This is a known issue in Windows NT 4.0; this is fixed in Windows 2000.

As I said, Standard Port Monitor uses SNMP (Simple Network Manager Protocol) to get status information. Many more modern printers use bidirectional support. LPR does not use bidirectional support. Standard Port Monitor does not support it, either; but it does support information coming back from the printer via SNMP. And SNMP will support status updates from all TCP/IP printing. Newer printers get full support; some older printers get at least basic information that SNMP will deliver back to the server.

It uses RFC 1759, which is the printer management information base, to obtain status. And status updates are received from the printer via a thread that runs asynchronously from the printer transmission thread. And that's very important, because that means that we're not depending on the same session that we set up between the printer and the print server to provide information back and forth. It allows much more efficient and faster printing, since we're using an asynchronous thread, coming back from the printer. If you need more information about how SNMP works, and also traps, there's a Q article, Q172879, which is "Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and Traps."

Internet printing is a very exciting new feature of Windows 2000 printing. It provides a lot of functionality that has never been available in printing before. We can manage printers via a browser over the Internet or intranet, and we can also print across the intranet or Internet. To do this, you have to have a Windows 2000 server that is running IIS, or you can use Windows 2000 Professional, running Peer Web Services, PWS.

We print via a protocol called Internet Print Protocol (IPP), which is encapsulated in HTTP. Security for Internet printing is provided by IIS. Internet Print Protocol came out of the IETF discussion on how to print across the Internet. Basically, if you are printing and you have installed your printer via a print service Web page, you send a job out, and it will try an RPC call first; and if that RPC call fails because you're not actually connected to the LAN, the communication will default across HTTP.

The client side of Internet printing: currently, out of the box, only Windows 2000 clients are supported. Windows 98 users can install the Internet printing client from our Microsoft Web site: http://www.microsoft.com/windows98/downloads/contents/WUPreviews/IPP/Default.asp . Currently there are no plans, that I am aware of, to provide an Internet printing client for Windows NT 4.0, although that may change down the road.

For setup, on the client, you need to use Internet Explorer 4.01 or later, which would be on a Windows 98 client, because Internet Explorer 5 is standard on Windows 2000. Printer installation from the print server, or, on the slide "Allows printer installation from the print server, printer Web page": what this means is that whenever you set up a print server using ISS and Internet printing, you automatically get a Web page that lists the printers that are installed on the print server. You can access that print server's Web page by typing server_name/printers. You'll see a list of printers, and you'll be able to go to the printer that you need. You'll also see the information there about location and properties, and you'll be able to install that printer across the Internet or intranet.

It does require that the drivers are local, so the drivers will be encapsulated into a CAB file and sent across the Internet to your system. It will, at that point in time, fire off your Add Printer Wizard; it will allow you to go into the Add Printer Wizard and install the driver and the printer. Once that is set up, you're actually printing to a URL, but it looks as though you're printing to any printer, as if you had just gone and done a point and print, or connected to the printer in some other fashion. When you're printing to a URL using Internet printing, all communications are sent via HTML, and that also is done to limit impact on the client. You don't have the amount of data that normally goes across the wire, that actually will affect the client.

The server side of Internet printing: like I said before, it requires IIS or PWS. This handles all print processing and security settings. Processing is done using ASP interpreters that are installed when the server is set up as a print server. The ASP interpreter will send the data to the client via HTML. Once the job comes in, IIS will transfer the job to spool, and the spooler service will set it up so that the job prints normally, just as it would if you were connected to the printer via a regular Internet connection, LPR, or Standard Port Monitor.

Move on to security (slide 13). Internet printing security defaults to basic authentication. And the reason it does that is we can only use other forms of security, such as Microsoft Challenge Response and Kerberos security, if you're using Internet Explorer. If you're using another browser, such as Netscape, we have to allow basic authentication. The security settings that are used are those for the individual users. For example, if you have a domain account or if you have an Internet account that the print server recognizes, those credentials will be used, unless you have selected Allow Anonymous Access when you set the Internet print server up.

Anonymous access is not chosen by default, so you actually have to choose to go in and do this. Additionally, under Windows 2000 Internet printing, you can use all the other security features that are available on Windows 2000. You can restrict who can access specific printers, you can restrict the ability to manage documents; anything you could do normally within Windows 2000, you can do with Internet security as well.

That concludes the information that I have, I'm ready for any questions.

Heidi: Okay, excellent. Thank you so much Wally. It is time to move on to the Q&A portion of this Support WebCast. The first question is: Will the slides be available and include Knowledge Base Q articles? I'll go ahead and address that.

We do make the slides available for download. However, I'm not sure if the Q articles are actually referenced on them. The article numbers will definitely be in the transcript, and maybe we can go ahead and reference those again. Wally, are you able to get to those easily?

Wally: Sure, no problem. There are two Q articles for Cluster server, one deals with Windows NT 4.0 and the other is for Windows 2000. The Windows NT 4.0 article number is Q197046, "How to Set Up a Print Spooler on Microsoft Cluster Server." And the Windows 2000 article is Q228904, "Print Spooler Support on Microsoft Windows 2000 Server Cluster." And there was also an SNMP article, I believe. And that article is Q172879, "Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and Traps."

Heidi : If you didn't catch those they will available in the session transcript.

With that question we have answered the questions that were submitted today. I want to encourage all of you to let us know what you think about the Support WebCast Program. We're very interested in your feedback regarding this session, other sessions you've seen, the program overall, and any topic suggestions you have for the future. You can send feedback at any time to the alias feedback@microsoft.com. Please be sure to include "Support WebCast" in the subject line.

That's going to wrap up our Support WebCast. I want to thank all of you for joining us today. I hope you found this information beneficial and find time to join us for another WebCast in the near future. Thanks so much, and have a terrific day. Bye-bye.