Printer Sharing

The cost of purchasing and maintaining a printer on each system could be enormous in a company.
To reduce the running costs of printers, one of the methods is to share the usage of printers. Some of the more common used methods of sharing are

Console Switch Sharing
PC Sharing / Server Sharing
Print Server

The easiest and fastest way to sharing a printer is by making use of a console switch. These consoles switches can be serial, parallel and even USB versions. The most commonly used is still the parallel version.

Based on the picture on the right, user of PC-A will have to switch to A on the console in order to print to the printer. The same goes to both users B and C. The main drawback of this method is that only one user can print at any one time. This is based on the manual switch.

Luckily, there are also several digital versions of these switches that do not require users intervene but are more expensive.

Another commonly used method of sharing is by sharing through a PC or Server that acts as a print server to the printer. This design does not require any maintenance except that the system that acts as the print server must be on all the time.

This effectively increase the cost of TOC and any issues with the system will disable the printing capability of the users in the network. Hence, it is highly recommended that 2 or more printers are shared in the same network segment.

Print Servers are design to replace the systems that are used to serve the printers. The main advantage is no delicated system is required and very much more cost effective and efficient.

Print Servers come with all shapes and sizes. Internal and External versions are also available. Typical Print Server has 1,2 or 3 parallel ports for printers. There are also version of USB print server as well. Those Internal versions are normally only 1 port.