Connectors working together to provide High Availability

This is exactly the kind of feature we want as enterprise customers who are testing out different solutions. We love our PaperCut and another department is testing out PrinterLogic, but we've found that Universal Print might be the best option for our organization if only they were to have options to run connectors either elastically or as multiple non-elastic redundant or highly available machines. Otherwise we would have to run a physical connector at each of our sites or maintain an Azure VM to run the connector for each or groups of sites.

I would also like to make note that using the connectors as a SaaS service would also be acceptable in my opinion!

This would be a really great feature to have implemented. I'm working on a setup right now that has many existing non UP supported printers that we want to use with UP.

I'm still playing around with the best options but I'm thinking the best options will be to have two print connectors on the network with the printers and register each printer twice, once from each connector, and do something like name the redundant set as Printer X (backup) or similar. It might be tidier to not share the redundant printer(s) and manually share the backups in the case of the main connector going down.

It would be nice if UP could recognize that the printer being shared from both connectors was the same and treat it as the same device in Entra so if one connector were to go down, from a user perspective, nothing would change.

Hi everyone, I am planning to move one of our clients from Print Server to Universal Print and they have multiple sites. It seems like I have to have separate windows server running for each site and connected to the network with VPN. We are in a phase of moving the client from domain joined to Azure. Any information would be much appreciated if someone enrolled universal print for a client with multiple sites. 

I haven't seen any Product Microsoft launch without having HA. Quite surprising to know they have launched UP. It's a single point failure. Much needed feature as printing is always a headache.

Duplicate idea: High Availability for Universal Print connector - Microsoft Community Hub

Duplicate idea: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/universal-print-feature-requests/universal-print-connector-redundancy-architecture/idi-p/3322597

Stewart Wallace, thank you for following up!

Everything you mentioned is very reasonable. Just in case I didn't do a good job at explaining the options you have; I want to make sure that one piece of the information is clear. 

In many cases, you don't need to buy new UP Ready printers to get rid of connectors. Many printer manufacturers released (and are planning to release) software /firmware updates for existing printers that make these printers UP Ready. If such upgrades are available for your current printers, I strongly suggest considering taking that approach. For printers that don't have an available upgrade, then the connector is the way to go.

Rani_Abdellatif 

Thanks for the swift response Rani,

I appreciate that replacing printers with UP Ready printers is the right way to go. I see the connector as something to use in the short term to bridge the gap between the old and the new, many businesses won't be able to justify the expense of changing all printers to support the new tech in one go.

However, business will make strategic decisions around print services in the future to support UP. The way I see it if the connector can accommodate a cost effective, resilient, flexible solution for migration to UP this will enable the removal / reduction of Branch Office Compute resources allowing business to move another piece of the IT puzzle towards the cloud without huge rip and replace projects.

Cheers, I look forward to the developments in this area 🙂

Stewart Wallace ,

That is a very interesting setup. Although we don't have the failover feature yet, I will check whether there is any reason this setup might not be recommended.  Having said that, I'm not sure it would work with a connector appliance because I assume that the secondary connector would need to be an appliance too. Connectors from different vendors wouldn't work as failover unit.

As I mentioned in my previous post to Frank and David, please consider Universal Print Ready printers to eliminate the need for connectors. Please get in touch with your printer OEM to find out if you can upgrade the software on your current printers to be Universal Print Ready.

FrankBeckers and David-SpreenICT,

Thank you for following up. There isn't an update at the moment. The feature is indeed on our backlog and we're working as quickly as we can to get to it. I wish I had more information to share. I will keep this page updated as the status changes.

I also would like to bring up the option to consider Universal Print Ready printers. These printers support Universal Print without the need for a connector which makes setup and management much easier. Please get in touch with your printer OEM to find out if you can upgrade the software on your current printers to be Universal Print Ready.