Deploy printer drivers before deploying a printer management profile

pieterschepens
New Contributor II

When a configuration profile for printer management is deployed to a Mac before the printer drivers are installed, the printers are configured as generic printers. 

Even the release notes of Jamf School mention this phenomenon:

Best Practice: Deploying printer drivers to device groups before configuring a printer management profile ensures that the printers are mapped with the correct drivers instead of generic drivers.

Question: how can you make sure that the printer management profile only gets deployed after the installation of the printer driver profile has been finished?

4 REPLIES 4

dolson
New Contributor

I had this issue after switching from Pro to School as Pro was already setup for me when I started here.  Not sure how Pro treated it, but what I have done is the following.  Staff Macs get put into a Staff device group which automatically installs the printer drivers.  I then have a Smart device group that has a scope filter that adds devices that have the Managed App (Installed) for the driver package.

Thanks for the suggestion of creating smart device groups based on the installation status of the printer drivers app. I'm testing this right now and will report back next week.

The approach with smart groups based on the installation status of the printer drivers (deployed as In-House app) is working perfectly fine. We push the printer configuration profile to those smart groups, so we avoid the problem of the generic printers without drivers. Thanks for the suggestion!

K3v1nK33ch
New Contributor III

I'm wondering how you pushed the driver out to the MacBooks. If you pushed it with a profile as an In-House App, then you can go to Apps>Inventory>then open that app, scroll down to see the installed status.