We have a student lab that uses a single color printer and multiple print queues to handle color and b/w prints. We're also using pcounter for our auditing. We're moving off of Novell's NDPS system and onto Windows 2008, and I've hit a bit of a wall in this instance. The printing managers want to have a single printer in this lab (a Ricoh printer in this case) and have two separate print objects for color and b/w jobs, and charge separately for either.
This is not a simple thing. PCounter's color detection is not reliable in this instance so we can't use that to keep color jobs out of the b/w queue. What seems to work is if we put two different printers on the lab-stations with locked down drivers. This model worked well in the Novell environment as students would have to add the Novell Client to their laptops in order to print color jobs to the b/w queue, and we never found any who did that. A Windows printing environment changes all that since just about anything can print to Windows Print objects these days.
Our students will be able to use personal non-domained machines on the wireless network (and maybe the dorms) to map drives to the central file-servers, and presumably the central print-servers as well. We have zero ways to manage these privately owned, non-domained laptops, so do not have any kind of driver-level control; especially for all those MacBooks running around. This is why driver-level solutions are not viable.
We have to allow the entire student body to print to these printers, but we'd really like it if the spooler would only accept jobs from specific work-stations as well. Does the Windows printing environment support a feature like that?