I'm thinking over the possibility of getting a Mac Mini with 10.6 server at work for several reasons, chief of which is the idea that it would make setting up printers easier. Am I wrong in that assumption? As it stands, when I have to install printers on a new or reinstalled machine, I have to pick through several different driver versions, figure out which options are installed, yadda, yadda, yadda. It can be a real nightmare.

My thought is that having the print server function would make all this easier to set up on the various machines. Am I wrong? I've never really used OS X Server. We've got a mix of PPC and Intel Macs running 10.5 and 10.6, and 4 XP and two Vista machines.

Can't say about X Server, but my Mini here at home is our print server - printers are directly connected to my Mini with Printer Sharing turned on - allows the other Macs on the LAN to print to those printers. Extended printer functions are not available to those printing remotely, though.

Right, I should have mentioned that using the regular printer sharing features of OS X is not an option. It causes trouble. And these are production printers with finishers and things like that, so I need full access to the software on each machine.

Hmmm, not sure how that could work. IP printing?

Well yeah, they all print over the network... I guess maybe there's no simple solution, but I'd like it if there were, because once I'm gone from this place, they're going to be in trouble if something simple doesn't come along.

Then you don't want to get them OS X Server if you can help it. There used to be ESP Print Pro.

http://www.easysw.com/discontinued.php

Seems Apple bought Cups out in 2007, probably killed Print Pro.

I don't know of any other alternative though other than OS X Server with looking around. Maybe a physical Print Server like the Cisco/Linksys' or something would be easier in the long run than OS X Server.

That was my thinking - a dedicated network print server.