Publish a printer in Active Directory

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2

To publish a printer in Active Directory

Open Printers and Faxes.
Right-click the printer you want to publish, and then click Sharing.
On the Sharing tab, click Share this printer, and then type a name for the shared printer.
Select the List in the Directory check box to publish the printer in Active Directory.

Notes

To open Printers and Faxes, click Start, and then click Printers and Faxes.
Only a shared printer can be published. If you stop sharing a printer, the printer is no longer published.
If you add a printer using the Add Printer Wizard and click Share this printer, the printer will be published by default if the Group Policy settings Automatically publish new printers in Active Directory and Allow printers to be published are enabled, as they are by default.
You must open Active Directory Users and Groups to publish printers that are managed through print servers that are running Windows NT 4.0 or an earlier operating system.
Printers you add using the Add Printer Wizard are shared by default if you add them from a computer running a product in the Windows Server 2003 family. However, printers are not shared by default if you add them using the Add Printer Wizard from a computer running Windows XP.
You must have the Manage Printers permission for the printer you want to share or to publish.
You can create printer names that contain spaces, special characters, and more than eight characters. However, some clients do not recognize or correctly handle such names. The entire qualified name of a shared printer (for example \\PRINTER2\PSCRIPT) must contain 32 or fewer characters.

Your server might function differently based on the version and edition of the operating system that is installed, your account permissions, and your menu settings. For more information, see Viewing Help on the Web.