Windows domain - Easy printer on a Mac

[bigbird]

Hey

We are a business school, who wants to enable Mac users to print from our Windows servers.

At the momemt we are installing the printers on the Mac manually and locally on the mac using smb....

smb://username:password@domainname/server_name.dom.local/printer_name

We have to have them using the username and password for their domain user, as the printer that they are printing to, is a software spooler. So when a student prints to the "printer" called unv_xerox, it ends up i a program for Xerox, and the student can select any printer on the school, type in his / her username, and the print will be printed here.

Needless to say that it works perfectly on a Windows computer, as they can write \\server_name\unv_xerox, type in their username and password, and it works.

Is there anyway to make it easier for the Mac users ?

[mrcqm]

***Edit: I reread the original post and realized these are already network attached printers. Furthermore, they're not cheap printers. I'm sure Xerox themselves should have a great solution for you. I'll see what I can find.***

I wrestled with this same issue on a much smaller scale: My home network has mostly macs but still 2 windows computers. The cleanest solution I've found was to use a network attached printer.

In case a new printer isn't an option, and if you still can't get this to work right, you may want to consider a work-around. You can always have people "print" to a file (i.e. a pdf), save that pdf in a specific folder, and have a script that automatically prints everything that lands in the folder.

I did that for a bit before I got my network printer. In my case the printer was physically attached to a mac so I just used automator to monitor a specific folder and automatically print any pdf it found there.