Event banner
Event details
Since March 2021 we see a lot of printer vendors struggling to keep up with their V3 drivers making them compatible with the needed security patches provided by Microsoft. If we think about Cloud printing how will this affect regular issues you have on-premises.
like
V3 printer drivers that are not packaged
V3 drivers that packaged and "modern" but no longer properly signed (e.g. Seagull 2021 drivers),
why there are so few vendors using V4 drivers and if so they have a lot of drawbacks in featureset compared to V3
Would we need V3 or V4 drivers with cloud printing and what about point and print, would this become legacy?
Are printers supported that have very special features like sorting, different output, or special after print handling (stamping etc)?
- With Universal Print, the printer driver used on the end-user's Windows client is a OS built-in class driver that automatically adjusts and shows the printer capabilities depending on what the physical printer can support. Customers would not need to worry about managing printer drivers. On the physical printer side of the deployment, Universal Print ready printers connects and supports Universal Print directly so no printer drivers are needed as well. For printers that need to use the Connector software package as the proxy between the printer and Universal Print, then there is still printer drivers involved and need to be managed.
- Karl-WE, please provide a couple of examples of important feature set that you feel are missing in V4 compared to V3 drivers? This information will help us investigate and plan for future improvements.
- Jimmy_Wu we have recently seen this on implementation attempts of Kyocera universal drivers and they list a good list of drawbacks to V3 universal drivers like stapling and punching etc. Or issues with different things about graphics printed from the web or with PDF files. I would have to look up these but in practice the only V4 drivers we usually can deploy are the default drivers for PDF and XPS from Microsoft. Is this different with other vendors. I am expierenced with HP, Kyocera, Brother, Zebra, Konica Minolta and other brands but I see a common lack of V4 among these.
- Thank you Jimmy_Wu this means we cannot leverage Cloud Print without buying new printers that support these drivers except having a middleware? Who does provide the middleware? What about solutions that establish follow me printing with a chip or pin?
- A number of printer OEM partners have announced integration support for their existing printer models. The list of partners with solutions are listed at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/universal-print/fundamentals/universal-print-partner-integrations. We are continuing to work with additional OEM partners and as they have integration offerings ready, they will be added to that page.
