Best practice adding printers to Self Service

[mhasman]

Hello,

I am looking for ideas and best practice adding big number of printers to Self Service.

Talking about 20-30 floors with many printers around. I do not want to put all of them as one big list under one category in Self Service, it would be better to separate printers by floors somehow. Seems like not a good idea to create 30 individual categories is Self Service for printers only - by floors.

Is there any way to create sub-categories?

I highly appreciate all advices, suggestions and recommendations!

[millersc]

Depending how the building is laid out, might be able to do "corners" and by floor. 4th floor, West corner or 4th floor, W Corner.

[mconners]

We are experimenting with beacons for some things. The idea is to push out a policy/profile to all employe computers but limit the printer to only when in range of the beacon. This way if the employee's computer isn't close the printer, they aren't able to see it and use it.

The initial thought was similar to what you are seeing @mhasman we didn't want to bring in one big list. Sure, we would have a large list initially, the user however would only see printers in range of their system. The other thought initially was our users tend to be very mobile. I am not sure how many printers we are dealing with here at the college, but it would be many to be sure.

The limitation we are running into is equipment where bluetooth isn't on or the computer is old enough where low energy bluetooth is possible.

Like I mentioned, we are have this idea and are testing at the moment. So far though, things seem promising in some respects.

[millersc]

Depending how the building is laid out, might be able to do "corners" and by floor. 4th floor, West corner or 4th floor, W Corner.

[mhasman]

@mconners Michael, yes, the beacons solution looks great, and I was thinking about that. But it looks like a big infrastructure project to deploy. Sub-categoryes in Self Service might help to hide&organize 70-80 items.

@millersc Steve, we use similar structure for printers naming "Floor+Corner+B&W/Color". But all of them added to Casper, still too many items for one category in Self Service

[Look]

If your using AD you can make the printers visible in the directory and then have a script that pulls the list.
We do something similar to this, we have a naming convention so that you can use a 3 digit code to specify the building and floor (i.e. WG3) so we have a script that prompts the user for this and returns the printers on that floor.
You can then either script adding the printers directly as we did or work out a way to call a customer triggered policy to install the printer(s) you want, if you do it like this you just have one "Find & Install Printer" policy, the other policies don't need to be in Self Service (although they could be as well if you wanted).

[haircut]

If you want to maintain a CSV inventory of your network print queues, you can try my Self Service Printer Installer.

[techjason]

We are working on a similar issue here. What we do is have categories set up like the following: Printers-Department1, Printers-Department2 and so on. Then we scope the printers in the categories to that department (and Admin group) only. This means that users only see 1 or maybe 2 printer categories in self service.

However, on the JSS it looks a little worse, but we just hit hide all, and then expand what we need.

[mhasman]

@techjason I agree with scooping printers by departments, floors, etc. My point is to reduce as possible the number of visible categories on the Self Service main page. Having 40 Printers-Floor# categories even on the end of the Self Service list looks like a bad design for me.

[mhasman]

Seems like the only option is to wait for new ver. 10 Self Service and hope if it comes with sub-categories.

[techjason]

@mhasman The users would not see all of the caetgories, they would only the ones they have access to like Printers-Floor14.

[emily]

We use this workflow: https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2014/02/06/deploying-canon-print-drivers-with-printer-setups-via-c...

We then scope to IP ranges in Self Service. If your floors are on different VLANs that should be easy to configure. If not, I'd recommend a good naming convention and maybe a PDF in the Self Service plugins with floormaps that include printer locations.