The NDD Print Agent has several installation modes, your choice should be made by the administrator based on the used features and the printing environment you have.
I use quotas, policies, or accounts:
My environment has print server and all the stations use mapped queues of this server, no station has local print queues:
In this scenario there are two ways of installation:
Install, on the server, the Full NDD Print Agent, with the option "I have stations with the ‘Agent Notifications’ installed", and in the stations, the NDD Print Agent Notifications. In this case:
All the printing analysis will be performed on the server (page count, document color check), which may require more server hardware resources.
The only operation performed by the station is the receipt and presentation of the (pop-up) notification sent by the NDD Print Agent (installed on the server) in order to collect information pertinent to the printout.
In this case all stations must have the "NDD Print Agent Notifications" installed, otherwise the prints will be canceled if there are policies that require some user interaction.
Print queues that are installed directly at the stations will not be monitored.
It does not perform monitoring counters and USB supply.
In this mode it is necessary to configure the antivirus to not monitor the files of the NDD Print Agent, because due to the injection process1 that the application uses in the printing monitoring, some versions of antivirus can identify the application as a malicious process, blocking all the NDD Print Agent's performance over the Windows print stream.
Install the Full NDD Print Agent on the workstations and on the server. In this case:
The printing analysis will be performed on the station that originated the print spool, thus requiring less hardware resources of the server.
In this mode it is necessary to configure the antivirus to not monitor the files of the NDD Print Agent, because due to the injection process1 that the application uses in the printing monitoring, some versions of antivirus can identify the application as a malicious process, blocking all the NDD Print Agent's performance over the Windows print stream.
My environment has a print server, and some stations use the mapped queues on this server, but I also have stations with local print queues:
In this scenario, the Full NDD Print Agent must be installed on the server and on the workstations.
In this mode it is necessary to configure the antivirus to not monitor the files of the NDD Print Agent, because due to the injection process1 that the application uses in the printing monitoring, some versions of antivirus can identify the application as a malicious process, blocking all the NDD Print Agent's performance over the Windows print stream.
My environment has only USB printers:
In this scenario, the Full NDD Print Agent must be installed on the workstations.
In this mode it is necessary to configure the antivirus to not monitor the files of the NDD Print Agent, because due to the injection process1 that the application uses in the printing monitoring, some versions of antivirus can identify the application as a malicious process, blocking all the NDD Print Agent's performance over the Windows print stream.
I do not use quotas, policies, or accounts:
My environment has a print server, and all stations use mapped queues on this server, no workstations have local print queues:
In this scenario the NDD Print Agent Accounting and USB Monitoring must be installed on the server and on the stations.
My environment does not have a print server, so the stations have local print queues:
In this scenario the NDD Print Agent Accounting and USB Monitoring must be installed on the stations.
My environment has only USB printers and I use only the capture of USB counters:
In this scenario the NDD Print Agent Monitoring USB on the stations.
NOTE
1 Injection process is the act of linking the NDD Print Agent's DLL to processes running on Windows in order to intercept calls made to the printing API (Hooking), and is used in the following installation modes:
The other ways of installation do not install the service responsible for the injection in Windows.
