CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

that with these printer drivers, I can print to almost any printer. Some printers
may require you to set them into an emulation mode to handle a driver other
than their native one.
1002
As you might imagine, setting up printers and MFDs in an enterprise
environment differs from the process in a SOHO environment. Here’s a
scenario. Bayland Widgets Corporation has 30 users who share access to two
high-end color laser printers, two very fast black-and-white laser printers, one
MFD (mainly used for scanning and copying purposes, but it also prints), and
a trio of very nice inkjet printers. The printers and MFD are located in
various places for convenience and managed by a single print server.
To make things a lot simpler than going to each client machine and
installing these networked printers, Tony the Admin deploys the printers and
MFD using Windows group policy to map the correct printers for all 30
workstations (plus several laptops as well). As users log in each morning, the
group policy maps the MFD and the closest color laser printer to all of the
workstations and laptops. It only maps the high-quality inkjet printers to the
marketing department workstations, however, and the fast black-and-white
laser printers to accounting. This all happens automatically with the correct
drivers loaded as necessary.
EXAM TIP Expect a question or two on the CompTIA A+ 1002 exam
giving you a scenario where you need to choose printer sharing vs. network
printer mapping. The big difference is scale. Sharing a printer or MFD in a
SOHO LAN is pretty easy. It’s also easy to install a shared network printer.
Once you scale up, though, management of many workstations and
printers/MFDs becomes a pain unless you map via a group policy that applies
to a lot of computers or users.
Note that you could also automate printer mapping via an Active
Directory domain logon script, as discussed back in Chapter 19. Be careful
on the exam if logon script is an option and group policy is not.