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Hyperlink to a Network Printer?

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by chrisnez72 1 view

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In Excel, or even Word, can you set up a Hyperlink to a shared network printer? I am a Network Admin for a pretty large company that has a presence all over the U.S. Instead of walking people through installing printers all of the time, I would like to have a Hyperlink available that they can just click on to install a printer. Oh yeah, we are using Windows 2000.

Thank you.

Regards,

Chris Niespodzianski, MCSE, MCP+I

7 replies

by chrisnez72

Just to be clear, I have tried setting it up using the UNC (\\Server\Printer) but that hasn't worked. Being HTML, is it even possible to set this up?

by joseph moore

If your print server is a Windows box AND is running IIS, there is a default virtual directory called PRINTERS in the default web site.
So, if your print server with IIS is at 10.1.1.2, you could go to;
http://10.1.1.2/printers

Your users wouldget a login/password box (PRINTERS virtual directory uses Windows authentication, not anonymous access for security). They log in, and then they would get a HTML page with links to ALL share printers the print server is sharing out.
There is also an Install Printer link for each printer. They can click the link and the printer will be installed on their machines.
Try it out. It is interesting.

by duskos

Joseph Moore is correct.
I would just like to add something more.
Since you are using Windows 2000, I assume you are using Active Directory (AD) too.
Well, shared printers are automatically published in AD and users can search for printers using AD instead of clicking thru network places.
If you also fill in location field for each printer, users could search for printers in given location. But that's not all, they could search for other attributes like color and double sided printing capability. This is automatic because this information is extracted from printer properties.

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