Recently I had found that it is far more reliable to connect CUPS on client workstations directly to CUPS on a Linux server rather than getting Samba involved. (Blog post here) With that in mind, I went searching for how to do the same for Windows workstations. Microsoft calls such capabilities "Internet Printing" within Windows, and it is very easy to have the same success with Windows machines.
There seems to be a bug in Ubuntu in that when you reboot the system all remote CUPS printer connections are forgotten. This sounded like something needing a bit of scripting magic, so I went searching for how to accomplish that. Turns out it was quite simple actually. The utility lpadmin will be your friend to command line administer printers / print queues. The first lpadmin command attaches to the CUPS shared network printer queue via the IPP protocol, and the second lpadmin command sets the printer as the system default.