Printer Queue

[rkovelman]

Hi All,

What do you use for printer queues in your businesses? We have a few products that could do the task but wondering what the standard is that most of you use. Or do you all do local printing?

Thanks!

[Look]

We have a Fuji Xerox FollowYou solution (You print from any computer, walk to any printer, swipe your card and it prints there). Works very well in an education (20k students) type scenario but probably not the cheapest solution out there.

[bvrooman]

We have a similar system: NT-ware uniFLOW. It seems to work quite well, though the Mac driver leaves something to be desired. We've just had to retrain users that if they need stapling, etc., to make the changes on the printer touchscreen before releasing the job to print.

We preferred uniFLOW over the Xerox solution because it works with all of our printer makes/models so we didn't need to try to get out of any leases that weren't up yet, and the Xerox system had tremendous database issues during our test period.

[rkovelman]

Thanks guys. I ask because we obviously have Casper but also ExtremeZ and Centrify. I was thinking of using ExtremeZ and then having Centrify or Casper map the printer. But I think my question/issue is the drivers. I was hoping I could have something act like the Windows side where the local machine doesn't necessarily need the drivers. I have looked at the solutions both of you presented and they were also, just okay.

[stevevalle]

We have all of our printers managed by print servers.

I create the printer objects using the CUPS web interface, then upload them to Casper Admin. All printer objects point to the print servers (lpd://printserver1.companyname.com/printer123)

I have a Self Service policy for each printer object which also includes a script that determines what type of printer is being installed (canon, xerox, etc). If the driver is not installed, another policy is kicked off to install the driver before adding the printer to the computer. I use custom triggers for this.

These are my install printer drivers policies:

This is one of my Self Service printer policy:

[Look]

Because we have a mono vendor environment the drivers are pre deployed to all machines and all machines get the single queue for the FollowYou printers.
I also added a Self Service script for adding additional small single function devices, if you have your printers in AD and listed in the directory you can pull the list from there quite easily to present to the users.
We also have a strict naming convention so it makes it easier to pull only relevant out.