I'm looking for the best way to centrally administer (and track!) printing for our AD domain. I know Windows Server can be configured to be a "Print Services" server, but it's my understanding that this is simply to centralize queues, and doesn't really do accounting and reports (who printed what, when, how often, etc).
Our printers range from basic USB local printers (that may or may not be shared to nearby cubicles), classrooms with dedicated Win7 x86 boxes that sit in the corner and act as print servers (not attached to any individual machines, because many machines dual boot OSX and Windows Vista or Win7), and larger 'Big Copiers' that sit on the network natively.
Since being hired there recently I've begun publishing the shares into a standardized format in AD, but the system is pretty unorganized. I'd like to have a central print server that every box reports queues to, and that users can go to find any printer on the network when they want to add a printer to their machine (or I want to deploy to them via group policies).
I have spare Windows 2008 servers at my disposal to use if the Print Services thing is the way to go, or I'm comfortable building up a Linux CUPS box or whatever. I'm starting to dig around into how would be best to approach this, but figured this would be posted in the meantime if anyone wants to throw 2 cents in in the meantime.
Thanks.