Questions and Requests

Copper Contributor

First off; sorry if some of these features are already confirmed without me noticing it. I'm just creating a list of features that we need and some that are nice to have. Sorry for poor english and spelling that ain't correct. 

 

Server Print

The ability to manage and deploy printer queues that are shared from a print server. This is important so that we can manage secure print queues or queues that has to be installed on a server due to an application.

 

IPP

Is IPP printing supported?

 

Central Driver Management

Is there a driver management system or are all queues using the same driver? What about printers that don't support a universal driver like Label printers?

 

Mac Support

Mac support are essential for us so that we can have one system where we manage all queues. Is this something that are supported or are in the plans to be supported down the road? If we are able to upload our own drivers, how would this work on the Mac? In Printer Installer we have to upload a Mac driver from a Mac.

 

LPR Support (Used for our guest print solution today)

Today we are using LPR to a DMZ server to be able to offer guest print functionality. Is this something that are supported? For us this is currently the only way to support a good quality Guest Print solution that works with both Windows and Mac without to much software and client install.

 

Other Guest Print solutions

As our customers often have guests in their offices we need a good guest print solution. Is there a possibility to share queues to everyone based on their location? Something like a time limited sharing for guest would be a cool solution. Maybe even Self Service solution where the customer themself creates a pin to allow the guest to connect to the printer, with or without a time-limit.

 

Easy management for several customers, how are they divided in the administration view?

As we have several customers who themself have several offices we need to be able to have a administrator view where we can select Customer and then select the office or department. If all queues are put in one list it would be impossible to manage 2000 queues.

 

Citrix Support

Is native Citrix support implemented? Will the system notice that the user are using Citrix and be able to list the queues only available to Citrix? There are often different drivers for the Citrix environment and Local environment due to issues and poor driver programming.

 

Automatic Deployment based on AD groups, GPS location or network.

Is automatic deployment implemented and how does this work? Can we set different parameters like IP-Range, AD groups and GPS locations where a given queue should be installed automatic? What if the user goes to another office, will the queue then be removed from the client automatically?

Example: User 1 is at Office 1 and is getting the ip 10.10.1.30 -> the queues for this location is installed automatically. If user 1 then moves to Office 2 and is getting the IP 10.10.20.40, the queues for Office 1 is removed and the queues for Office 2 is installed.

 

API

Is there an API available to read and write to Universal Print? We are using our own portal to display information and stats on our printers and queues.

 

3 Replies

@Marius_Bekk - thanks for the comment and sharing the list. This is awesome. 

 

Can you file each of these requests independently under Feature Request section for others to upvote?

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/feature-requests/idb-p/UniversalPrintFeatures

 

Server Print - can you elaborate on this a bit more? What do you mean by expose it in cloud? If document is being sent to the queue on server, then how do you see the value in cloud on the queue?

 

IPP - Universal Print uses IPP based protocol and is committed to support IPP defined attributes as per the Mopria specs.

  1. On client, we use IPP class driver shipped within Windows to talk to cloud service. There is no other driver required.
  2. New Universal Print ready printers (when they come to market) will talk to Universal Print service using IPP protocols as well. 
  3. Printers currently existing in the market will use a proxy (Universal Print Connector).
    1. There can be multiple printers connected via a single proxy that talk to cloud service. Each printer on Connector is installed using the printer manufacturer supported drivers.
    2. Universal Print does the translation from driver specific details to IPP and vice-a-versa.
    3. Please note that printer driver just needs to be installed at ONE place - Connector.
    4. A customer may distribute their printers across multiple Connectors.

Central Driver Management - As mentioned above, all drivers are on the Connector. I expect label printers to be installed on Connector using their specific drivers, and their capabilities can then be converted into IPP attributes.

 

Mac Support - I can already see that in feature ask section :)

 

Guest Print - Add to feature request log. 

 

Administrative Management - I am assuming all the customers will be on different AAD tenants. In that case they will need Universal Print provisioned separately for their tenant and can manage printers in Universal Print by logging in with their tenant admin/print admin credentials. 

 

Citrix Support - add to feature request log

 

Automated Deployment - We are working on this. However, feel free to log in feature request. Criteria in your description of how to automate is interesting :)

 

API - We have developed APIs in Microsoft Graph and will share more on the same soon. Hold tight!

 

Not sure if I answered to your liking. Feel free to ask further :)

 

 

@Saurabh_Bansal 

 

Thank you for your respons and sorry for mine being so late.

 

Server Print

I can understand why this might seem weird and this has something to do with secure print solutions. If my customer have Safecom installed as a secure print solution we do need to have the queue and print job go though the Safecom server for this system to work. And the queue that we are sharing to the user then also would have to be on the server, right! So if a company have one Safecom enabled queue and one direct print queue they now have two places to install queues from.. The Safecom queue from the server (or GPO) and the direct printing queue via the Universal Print system. This creates confusion and also makes technical support a little harder. I would love to have the ability to add this Safecom queue to the Universal Print system, just so that the user can install all their queues from the same place. 

 

Thank you for the rest of your response. I will go though and add the feature request if they are not added already.

 

Kind regards

@Marius_Bekk thanks for the details. This is exciting and we hope that existing print service providers will review how their solutions work with Universal Print which is a much different platform from traditional on-prem server based technologies.

 

Having said that there might be a way to make Universal Print work with some of the existing solutions. You should work with your provider (SafeCom in this case) to understand if they support Universal Print and what are the best practices.