Printer server in BYOD environment

[rickard.claesson]

Hello,

I work for a company which deliver printers to different types of temporary clients, like production offices and press centers. This means that basically all users bring their own devices.

 

Our method has been to just provide the printer and include a USB flash drive with the drivers for Windows and MacOS. This method has given us some extra work, since not all people are tech savvy enough to install a printer on their device and since printer drivers are not always plug and play. For bigger deliveries, this has meant that we have been forced to have assign personnel to run around and help users with their devices, which is very time consuming (especially since the user count might be anywhere between 100 to 1000 people).

 

Therefore, we have now started to look into the world of printer servers.

 

In a perfect world, the user shows up, receives a simple instruction to install a printer, which in turn really is a print server, with some generic (preferably preinstalled) printer driver. The print server, which have the actual printer installed with the real driver for the printer, then relays the print to the printer.

 

I’m not sure if this possible to achieve, but it would be the target delivery. We have looked into CUPS a little bit, but I’m not sure if it can act as a “printer relay” like I described above for both Windows and MacOS.

What do you guys think? Is this possible to accomplish, or is there some other solution which might work better or would be easier to set up?

 

(We have spoken with our printer supplier, and they use some Windows+Linux-server setup, but I haven’t received the specs on this yet.)

[Trinopoty]

I use a simple RPi print server in my office (with CUPS). It works seamlessly with MacOS and Linux but Windows users still need their own drivers. It seems that there are ways to provide Windows drivers automatically with Samba but I've never used this.

If you're responsible for installing the printer on the server, this approach could work.

[Robchil]

As long as you don't have all the computers in a domain, it's not realy possible to control it. 

what i would do as long as all computers should be able to print within the local network. i would get a HP pagewide with EWS, windows atleast will detect it localy and install drivers and app automaticaly.