Forum Discussion

Nickson_Easow's avatar
Nickson_Easow
Copper Contributor
May 17, 2020

Universal Print set up requirement

Hi, I am new to universal print. Can someone clarify the below points? Our tenant is a cloud-based environment with Azure AD & Domain services. We don't have an on- prem AD; Intune manages all our ...
Philip_Demaree's avatar
Philip_Demaree
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
May 18, 2020

Nickson_Easow I will try and answer your questions as a whole. 

Universal Print acts as a Print Service accepting print jobs from clients and sending the jobs to the printers. 

 

Printers that are UP- Compatible would be able to register as AAD devices and be registered in the UP portal. These printers would then be notified and would pull down the print jobs directly from UP. Currently there aren't any UP-compatible printers in the market, but we are partnering with the major print IHVs for future devices. 

 

In the meantime, the Connector service is designed to provide the communication between a Windows Server 2016 or later to publish a locally installed printer to UP. It handles all the notifications and retrieval of print jobs from UP on behalf of the local print queue. You would create the local print queues on the server using a printer-specific driver, and then use the Connector to expose and register those printers with UP. 

 

An on-premise AD is not required. The Connector can be installed on a stand-alone or workgroup machine with the local print queues. The Connector is registered with UP using an AAD account with the Global Admin or Print Admin role. Once the printer is registered and shared, the Connector service, and as such the server it is installed on, must be running for the print job to succeed. There is no fail-over solution at this time for the Connector. 

 

As for pushing out printer connections, we are working on that functionality via Intune and other possible options. 

Nickson_Easow's avatar
Nickson_Easow
Copper Contributor
May 19, 2020

ThanksPhilip_Demaree 

 

Can you please help me for the below

  • What is the specification required for the new windows 2016 server?

  • I need to make sure all our printers can communicate from the new server & install those 10 Printer drivers to the new server? Is that correct?

  • What happen if the Universal Print connector Server is down or the service is not running, what will be the end-user experience?Is that means users cannot print
  • Any other automated option to add universal printer to a windows device via In tune
  • Philip_Demaree's avatar
    Philip_Demaree
    Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
    May 19, 2020

    Nickson_Easow Answers in order:

    1. No specification, any SKU of Server 2016 should work. It can be stand alone or joined to the domain. 

    2. Yes, the printers need to installed as local printers on the same network as the physical devices, so that they can print a test page. 

    3. The printer should show as Offline on the client if the Connector or the spooler on the server is not running. Users will not be able to print. 

    4. This feature is currently being worked on, and should be available in a future release. 

Resources