What Are Printer Pools?
Overview
This article will explain what Printer Pools are and how you can implement them to help manage your licenses and printers.
Applicable to
BarTender 2019 and later
Information
What Are Printer Pools?
Printer Pools work hand in hand with a License Partition and do the heavy lifting for the pair. By default, one Printer Pool is created upon installation. Here are some of the features of a Printer Pool
- Control user permissions to use a certain License Partition
- Track how many printers are used in each Printer Pool
- Track various printing usage statistics
What a Printer Pool cannot do
- Set the number of printers in each pool (set by the License Partition)
- Allow or deny use of a printer(controlled by Printer Groups)
Where Are Printer Pools Located?
To see your Printer Pools, please do the following:
- Open the Administration Console on a computer that has permission to manage the license
- Open the Licensing section on the left-hand menu if it is collapsed
- Click License Setup
- At the top of the dialog, select the Printer Pools tab
- Locate the name of your license host on the list, if there's more than one.
- Click on the host name to open the license information.
Each Printer Pool will have its own subsection where you can see all usage statistics and set permissions.
Features of the Printer Pools Section
If your Printer Pool is linked to a License Partition, you'll be able to see some useful statistics in the main dialog. For example, let's use my largest partition, aptly labeled the Deep end.
Printer Statistics
This dialog tells you some useful statistics:
- size of the linked License Partition (in this example, 70 printers)
- how many printers have been used in the last 7 days
- Number of jobs submitted and how many labels have been printed.
These statistics can give a good feel of the traffic and usage of a particular partition as jobs are sent through it.
Printer Usage Details
If at least one printer has been used in a Printer Pool within the last 7 days, a small box becomes available:
Clicking this button will allow you to see the full printer usage for the last 7 days
This dialog tells you the name of the license that is being used (my license is named License Host but by default, this will be your Support Number) as well as details about the printer and the print job.
If the Printer Pool has not received any jobs within the last 7 days, the small box will be grayed out as there is no information to show.
Linked License Partition
At the bottom of the Printer Pools section are two collapsed section, the first one being the License Partition. Clicking this will expand the section and detail which partition is linked with this Pool.
Here you can link and unlink a License Partition to this pool. If this section is empty, that means it has not yet been linked to a matching License Partition.
For information on how to link the pair, please see How to add Printer Pools and License Partitions to a license
User Access Control
At the bottom of the Printer Pools section is the User Access Control. Here you can control who has permissions to use this particular Printer Pool. By default, Everyone is allowed to use this Printer Pool.
For this example, I've added a local account who has permission to use the Pool as well. For more information on how to use this section, please see Controlling User Access in the Administration Console