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My school uses G Suite so AD has been made pretty much redundant apart from 5/10 office staff who still use their domain accounts and access file shares. Now, most of the staff use their own personal computers or shared computers with just a single non-domain account. This works very well for us and requires little maintenance.

The problem we have is with printing. We have C. 25 printers in various offices, 15 of these are the exact same model (hp) printer. Some staff have connected these printers to the WiFi to install on their computers and others are connected on the LAN with fixed ip, but since the staff WiFi and LANs are routed adding a printer in windows gives a list of printers with the exact same name meaning people are just randomly adding printers hoping that it is the one in their office.

My intention is to; connect all printers to a device VLAN with either fixed IP or use an old server that I have to do DHCP and IP reservations on this subnet and set up a print server.

Can I share the printers form this server so that non-domain PCs can easily install the printers without credentials? Or do you have a better idea of how to administer the printers?

James D
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2 Answers2

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Google Cloud Print can be provisioned to specific users and groups. You or someone technical can rename them to something more unique than their model number.

John Mahowald
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  • Yes, renaming the printers is the obvious fix for some of the problems but doesn't help much with the provisioning. I knew about Google Print but not the cloud print connector. This may be the solution I'm looking for I'll set up and give it a trial run. Thank you – James D Feb 11 '18 at 06:15
  • Users might be able to pick out their printer if there was some naming convention. Which will not happen in an unmanaged environment, users will plug in and go. – John Mahowald Feb 11 '18 at 20:22
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Ezeep Dash let’s you configure the IP addresses and drivers for your printers in a web portal and a direct IP print queue gets created on the PCs or Macs based on that information. Works with and without AD.

Christoph
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