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Microsoft Entra Blog
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Print to corporate printers from Azure AD joined Windows 10 devices!

Alex Simons (AZURE)'s avatar
Alex Simons (AZURE)
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Sep 07, 2018
First published on CloudBlogs on Feb, 01 2018

Howdy folks,

Every day we hear from more and more enterprise customers who are eager to go cloud only for managing their Windows 10 laptops. Unfortunately, one thing has been standing in their way. Up until now,  there has never been a good way to print to a corporate printer from an Azure AD joined device.

Today I'm happy to let you know that this is no longer true! We've just released Microsoft Hybrid Cloud Print , a print solution built specifically for Azure Active Directory-joined and Intune-managed devices. Now people in your organization can use Azure AD-joined devices to discover on-premise printers, and can print from work or from home or from anywhere else they can connect to the internet.

How cool is that?!

Hybrid Cloud Print is built on top of the Windows Print Server role, so it supports traditional domain-joined devices in addition to Azure AD joined devices. Best of all, your existing printer management scripts, tools, reports, and procedures will continue to work as is. And it’s secured by Azure Active Directory, so you and your users still benefit from features like multi-factor authentication, identity protection and single sign-on (SSO).

Once deployed, the print discovery and installation experience will be familiar to your users.

Figure 1: Printer discovery in OS Settings

Figure 2 : Filter printer search results by location and/or keywords

Figure 3: Cloud printers have their own unique printer icon

The print experience is the same as printing to any other printer.

Figure 4 : Printing from Edge browser

Solution overview

Hybrid Cloud Print consists of two new IIS service endpoints:

  • Printer Discovery service
  • Windows Print service

There are also six new MDM policies to configure and manage Hybrid Cloud Print. These enable the client device to know where the IIS service endpoints are and which Azure tenant information to authorize against.

To get started, take a look at the Hybrid Cloud Print overview , watch the Ignite 2017 session on Hybrid Cloud Print , and follow the deployment guide . And be sure to tell us what you think! We always want to hear from you.

Best regards,

Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons )

Director of Program Management

Microsoft Identity Division

Updated Jul 24, 2020
Version 6.0
Product Announcements
  • Paul Youngberg's avatar
    Paul Youngberg
    Steel Contributor
    Nov 20, 2018

    Tried really, really hard to follow the published guide you included in this article to set this up - even left a lot of constructive feedback on the article for how it could be improved - but ultimately gave up and resorted to a third party guide. The documentation assumes a lot, is poorly ordered, is missing a lot of specific reasons for why specific steps need to be completed, and appears to throw extra steps in there for no reason (see app registration vs proxy comments - is it 3 or 5?). Please have someone re-write this article, I wasted a lot of time these past couple weeks working through it and in the end burned everything to the ground and got things working with a third party guide in less than a couple hours.

     

    For those that are interested, here's a great guide that walks you through each step in detail: https://blog.hametbenoit.info/2018/02/20/azure-hybrid-cloud-print-service/

  • ScrJeff's avatar
    ScrJeff
    Brass Contributor
    Jan 16, 2019

    Is there something in the works where it's doesn't require the on-prem AD/print system? As we're marching out of our data center and 100% in the cloud, we really need a solution that operates 100% in AzureAD with no requirement for additional on-prem items. I'm thinking along the lines of Google Cloud Print, where the printer can register directly with the cloud service.

     

    The alternative would be a very light-weight VM appliance that can act as the proxy between the local printers and Azure AD. 

  • Paul Youngberg's avatar
    Paul Youngberg
    Steel Contributor
    Dec 06, 2018
    Used the above solution, just not their published documentation. Cloud print works great, just waiting for Intune to up its game and allow us to map Cloud Printers based off of IP. Resorting to a script for now.
  • Fadi Matni's avatar
    Fadi Matni
    Copper Contributor
    Dec 06, 2018

    Hi Paul , thanks for this article can you provide me the name of the third party prinitng solution ?  because we are facing the same issue we have about 200 machine that joined to AD azure thanks

  • SilverArc4's avatar
    SilverArc4
    Copper Contributor
    Feb 11, 2019

    Hello ScrJeff ,

    Were you able to resolve this issue? My non-profit organizations is also moving 100% into cloud, leveraging most of MS solutions. Managed printing solutions remain unsolved..

  • ScrJeff's avatar
    ScrJeff
    Brass Contributor
    Feb 11, 2019

    MS is recommending the following service as a cloud-only print system, which integrates directly with AzureAD. 

     

    https://www.printix.net/

     

    We're evaluating it currently and it looks very promising. It's doesn't currently support accounting, but it a feature that is coming soon.

     

     

  • Fadi Matni's avatar
    Fadi Matni
    Copper Contributor
    Apr 06, 2019

    Hi , finally we are using now Uniprint solution  in POC environments for Machine Joined to AD azure works fine print from Windows 10 and Mobile iOS

    Thanks