Forum Discussion
Azure Universal Print drivers
MicrosoftRickWijn / kismat I understand your concerns here. However, Universal Print and traditional print drivers work on different technologies. Universal Print prints using PWG's standard IPP protocol eliminating the need for drivers. Printer manufacturers are developing firmwares that work with Universal Print using the IPP protocol.
Universal Print connector is a solution that tries to fill-in the gap until all printers can support Universal Print. It does the translation of driver model to IPP and this translation may vary depending on the quality of driver. I explained this in reply to another post - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/universal-print-discussions/universal-print-konica-minolta-limited-printing-preferences/td-p/2796882.
For Ricoh specifically, we have seen options getting dropped. Please reach out to Microsoft Support as some customizations may be able to help you.
For Universal Print printers, we do not recommend changing print drivers of user devices. Our goal is to get rid of drivers on user devices completely :).
Thank you very much for posting in to this thread. I'm very interested in this comment you made:
'For Ricoh specifically, we have seen options getting dropped.'
I, and I'm sure RickWijn also, would really appreciate it if you wouldn't mind elaborating on this please? The reason I ask is that from what I can see the last thing that Ricoh put out officially about support for Universal Print was this post in February- Ricoh is adding support for Universal Print to MFP devices. They have been pretty silent since then!
As things stand for me I have been playing around with Windows 11 to try and see if one particular function would be added (PIN printing) but this was negative. I am about to look to getting a few devices firmware updated to see if this will resolve the issue however if there is a possibility that this won't then I don't want to waste time and would rather be looking at other alternatives. I do appreciate your advice of contacting Microsoft Support and will keep this as an option in the back pocket in case all else fails as I would rather be able to get what I see as basic features working properly without the need for custom configurations for our environment.
Thanks in advance and I await your reply.
Kismat
- Saurabh_Bansal
kismat - the article you included is for Ricoh adding "direct" support for Universal Print in their printers. They do not mention about their existing drivers and how it works with Universal Print connector.
As I mentioned earlier, you may reach out to Microsoft Support - they might be able to customize some configurations to help workaround the custom declarations in the print driver.
PIN printing will be available for Universal Print ready printers only - and this too after printer manufacturers have announced support :). Unfortunately, it will not be available for printers behind connector at this point of time.
We recommend customers to reach out to printer OEMs directly as well - this will help them understand the customer demand.
Thanks,
Saurabh- Thanks for your replies Kismat and Saurabh_Bansal!
Are you also using the FollowMe utility? We have several Ricoh Printers and we can get our prints with our employee badge and it doesn't matter which printer you want to use. The employees only see 1 printer and they can get their prints on every printer.
