It has occurred to me that a workstation can connect to a printer in two ways: 1). Printing directly to the IP of the printer with the print driver installed locally. 2). Printing to a \Server\Printer1 share with the print queue residing on the server.

Question is which way is preferred?

I would assume that printing directly to a network printer rather than going through the server would be the most efficient from the point of view of network traffic. On the other hand I guess a server printer share would be easier to manage with the correct driver automatically being downloaded to the workstations.

Also what about using GPP (Server2012) to install this printer on the workstations, does that require any specific way?