Workgroup Printing

With Workgroup printing, the assumption is that the printer or printers are connected directly to the network, and that each user on the LAN creates the printer on his or her own computer and does not share it. Each user then sets his or her own printer driver settings and each computer must have the printer driver installed.

The disadvantage to this configuration is that you can't be sure that, for example, the paper tray you've designated as letter-sized actually contains letter-sized paper unless you physically go check it right before you print. Someone may have designated that tray as legal-sized paper and recently replaced the letter-sized cartridge with a legal-sized cartridge.

Each computer also has its own printer queue displaying only those print jobs sent from that computer. This is a disadvantage for determining where your print job is in relation to all the print jobs (including those from other computers), and gives the user no feedback about when a particular print job might actually print.

Another disadvantage to this setup is that errors (such as paper jams or no paper in the tray) appear only on the queue for the current print job. No other computer gets the error message. If the user at the computer getting the error message has left for lunch, printing could be held up for some time.