New in Documents, Printing, and Scanning Space

  • Article

There have been many improvements in Windows 7 and Server 2008R2 in the Documents, Printing, and Scanning space. These include great performance, stability, security, and reliability enhancements and entirely new feature additions to ease printing and scanning as well as print and scan management.

 

Printers now are part of the Device Stage experience in Windows that comes with a great new UI where users can see their devices, easily change settings, view status, order new supplies and so much more. Printing is now location aware which makes printing at home, at the office or any other network seamless and easy. Homegroup printing make sharing printers over your Homegroup as easy as connecting it to one of your Homegroup machines. Print Management Console (PMC) in Windows 7 gives administrators greater flexibility and ease in managing print servers by providing better support for driver management including a powerful All Drivers view with a single view of all print drivers across the administered print systems.

 

Scanning in enterprise gets a whole new dimension with Distributed Scan Management that enables authenticated access to scanners and ability to send scanned documents to emails, file shares and SharePoint for enterprise users. IT Admins ,in turn, can easily administer access to scanners as well as monitor scanner and scan job status. There is also better support for device initiated scanning. 

 

Windows 7 comes with a brand new XPS viewer with significant enhancements in viewing and searching XPS content. XPS documents are better integrated in Windows with previews available from Explorer and Outlook. The viewer comes built in with Rights Management and Digital Signatures to restrict access and digitally sign XPS documents.

 

A lot has changed deeper under the hood as well. Print drivers can now run isolated from the print infrastructure making the print subsystem more stable. Rendering enhancements enable rendering of XPS content with improved fidelity and performance and enable printing from XPS Applications to GDI Printers. Server Administrators can now delegate print administration tasks to "print administrators" enabling greater security and cost savings for small businesses. Printer Backup and Restore tool now comes with the ability to customize the restoration of a print server. There is a also a new set of native APIs to create, edit, view, save and print XPS files and another new set of native APIs for supporting Open Packaging Convention based file formats including XPS files, Word files, Excel files, PowerPoint files, and more.

 

--Khurram Zia & Jon Kay

   Program Managers

   Windows-Printing

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 18, 2010
    I agree.  It took me a year to start using Homegroup, but I've been amazed to print on either of our printers and how I can control their output.  This was one of the most pleasant surprises I've found in Windows 7.  What can I say:  "Better late than never."

  • Anonymous
    June 25, 2011
    Printing on Windows2008r2 is painfully slow and erratic.  This operating system is a complete failure.

  • Anonymous
    October 22, 2011
    Great... New stuff... Great, but you took out the most used feature in XP IIS which was internet printing.  WHY?  "becaue it is a client operating system"  is not a good answer, if that was theanswer, why was it put in XP.  It took a few clicks and open a port in the firewall to share a printer on the internet.  Is there any way manually to setup a virtual printer directory in IIS 7 to get this feature back?  The solution is to buy a Server.  NO.  I just need to print to the printer at my desk over the interent, could before, can't now.  I know I could load XP virtual, or VPN, but thats hours for something that usta take a few minutes.  Any way to set up IIS 7.X manually to share printers?

  • Anonymous
    October 31, 2011
    Yes, this is new stuff!

  • Anonymous
    May 10, 2013
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 10, 2014
    onPlatinum ICT provides Cloud computing in gold coast & Brisbane. No need to manage your own IT Infrastructure, work with cloud computing.
    http://www.onplatinum.net.au