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Does anyone out there have any experience of deploying a custom configuration for Xerox printers?



Our AD bound, Windows based devices have it easy as the configuration is pushed down from the print servers to the devices during the printer setup however our Mac fleet doesn't have the same luxury.



We've packaged our printers up in Jamf and they deploy quite happily with the driver bundle and out of the box settings but we really need to push the company default settings (Secure Print, double sided, B&W) out to the clients rather than have the users set these themselves...we did try the manual approach but even with step by step instructions they still managed to get it wrong!



Our printer fleet is basically Xerox WorkCentre 7970 MFD's so any settings would be a one size fits all but the problem is I've absolutely no idea where they are being stored - I can rule out the CUPS ppd files as having set the defaults on my Mac the ppd files are unchanged so guessing there is going to be a plist lurking somewhere holding the Xerox feature settings.



Any guidance anyone can give would be appreciated - I'm guessing that everything apart from the Secure Print could probably be handled in a ppd but having opened one up, I've come to the conclusion that CUPS is a dark place filled with witchcraft!



Thanks



John

Basically you need the lpoptions command, something like:



#!/bin/sh

lpoptions -p "PrinterName" -o PageSize=A4 -o XRBannerSheet=None -o Duplex=DuplexNoTumble -o XRFinisher=OF -o XRJobType=Secure


Note we script our Xerox printer installs using lpadmin, so the above is a best guess...

Setup a printer preset (or many) for the printer, setting the options you want. Use Composer to grab the following files from a user folder that has the proper Printer presets setup:



~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.print.custompapers.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.print.custompresets.forprinter.<printer_name>.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.print.custompresets.plist



Build a DMG in Composer. Make sure you set the Fill user template (FUT) and Fill existing user home directories (FEU) options on the DMG. That'll get you the printer presets you want for any Apple print dialog boxes. I believe you can duplicate the plist file with the printer name and rename it to match whatever printer a particular system has.



If you need those printer presets for Adobe products, they use their own print dialog boxes and you'll need to capture additional files depending on what program it is. Illustrator has a "print presets" file you can capture, for InDesign you need to capture the full program preferences which is a pain. It's the same basic process, capture the plist from the user's preferences, build a dmg, FUT and FEU.

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