Site specific Printer offering

[sd27ryan]

Would it be possible to implement Site specific printers?  For example, if a user was at Site A they would only be offered the printers available at Site A and not printers at sites B or C.

[#2]

@sd27ryan, hi, does the scenario include the user being mobile and will be travelling to the different sites?  And, will only be offered printers for the site the person is currently at?

What Universal Print currently offers is the ability to set the printer's location based on GPS.  When using Windows to discover the printer(s), we ask the OS for it's currently known location.  So, this does imply the user or organization has consented to allow access to location data in the privacy settings.  It then sends the client's GPS location info to the printer discovery service for use as a filter.  By default, the nearest 10 printers will be returned.

So while it is not officially a site specific functionality, it can provide a close equivalent functionality.

If you are looking for a way to provision printers to the Windows client device to be auto-installed based on the current site, please add or vote up in the Ideas Feature Request section of this tech community.

Regards,

Jimmy

[#3]

@Jimmy_Wu One reason we would like this, is to eliminate users accidentally printing to printers at a different site.  GPS location will be problematic, as our desktops and laptops don't have this built in.  Our internet location is not accurate either as it reports the location as our ISP's office not the actual site.

Our current print management solution has subnet filtering that allows only the printers on that subnet to be available to that subnet's users.

[#4]

@sd27ryan, sounds like to good value-add.  Please enter an entry in the Ideas Feature Request section.

[#5]

@sd27ryan - Universal Print provides the ability to add users to each printer.

Its a great idea to provide ability to control printing to a local subnet. However, I was wondering if you will like to explore the idea of controlling printer access by assigning it the users in same location as the printer? Is that possible in your scenario?

Thanks,
Saurabh

[#6]

@Saurabh_Bansal Thanks.  That is what I have done before, but here we have a number of users that move location regularly and so we have not defined users to site specific groups.

[#7]

@sd27ryan, that makes sense. You can add it to the Ideas.

One clarification question though - for users that move across sites, which printers will be added to device? If they have printers from multiple locations on their device then they can still print accidentally. Any ideas on how you envision to protect against accidental printing from such users?

[#8]

@Saurabh_Bansal Yeah that is a sticky one.  For the most part it hasn't been an issue, as the users that move around are used to making sure they select the right printer.  The vast majority of our users are assigned to a site and then stay there for the year.  So making sure that the machines at that site, can only see and install printers available at that site is preferable.

[#9]

@sd27ryan - cool! What I am hearing is that assigning access to printers of a given site to users within site will work for you (with a few exceptions) for the time being :). This will be the case till we consider the site based access feature.

Looking forward to your deployment! 

Thanks,

Saurabh

[#10]

@Saurabh_Bansal Thanks for considering my request.  For now I think we'll stick with our existing print management solution, as it offers the functionality that we wanted.  But we'll continue to trial UP.  Hopefully site-based access control comes in for RTM.

[#11]

We'll be looking into grouping our users differently as well. As that definitely has some advantages. Cheers.