Printer Provisioning and Print Driver Deployment

Making printers available on every device in your organization can be a tedious and time-consuming task. More daunting still is the fact that once set up, maintenance is always required.

You will need to oversee changes to your queue settings, every driver update, and even setting up new printing defaults when your colleague is tired of clicking Staple: Left, as this is their most printed format.

Ever wished you could simply let someone else deal with it all? Now you can.

MyQ Desktop Client can provision printers to signed-in users. You create a print driver configuration profile with your desired settings and distribute it to users in your environment only once.

Benefits of Printer Provisioning with MyQ Desktop Client

 

• No more repetitive clicking Next, during manual print driver installation on every computer in your organization – print drivers are installed silently and automatically.

• Users do not need to install drivers themselves – in many cases, they wouldn’t be able to. Permissions can prevent them from installing any software, so they would have to file a support ticket each time they need a new printer or adjustments to their current settings.

• Many drivers require contacting a device to finish the configuration. You can do this just once as part of the initial setup – and during print driver deployment, you distribute these preconfigured drivers to everyone who needs them.

 

• A new employee does not have to do any setup once they get a work computer or laptop. The Desktop Client can be preinstalled or ready to be downloaded via mobile device management (MDM). Once started, it creates printers for this user automatically.

• Users have their system printers updated when they change location. If your employees travel to a different site in your organization, their old printers are removed and new ones, available in this location, are automatically provisioned. Once they return, the local printers become available again.

• Students or employees bring their own devices to the office and want an easy way to start printing without having to go through huge numbers of settings in Windows/macOS.

 

• Administrators don’t need to set out on epic journeys across the organization to install drivers on every single computer. Prevent spending time on-site configuring printer settings – set up everything in advance and distribute the same copy of a driver to all connected computers.

• Easily test the print driver before you deploy it to your users. You can configure everything necessary on a queue available only to you, deploy it on your computer, and check that everything is ready. And if it is – copy the print driver configurations to the queues where you want to use them.

• Upgrade the print driver captured in a print driver configuration profile, and all client computers using this profile will also be upgraded. Re-capture the print driver settings and redeploy them, print drivers installed on client computers will receive the new settings.

 

What Scenarios Does Printer Provisioning Solve?

 

Computers in a domain can be managed in multiple ways. You can set up Group Policies or use modern MDM tools such as Microsoft Intune to install software.

However, the installation of print drivers through MDM tools sometimes requires additional configuration.

MyQ Desktop Client solves these limitations. Deploy the Desktop Client and it will take care of print driver deployment.

 

If you need to enable printing on computers that are not joined to your domain, such as BYOD devices, you can utilize MyQ Desktop Client.

With printer provisioning, you can simply have users install the MyQ Desktop Client which takes care of automatically installing and updating printers on these devices.

 

MyQ Desktop Client printer setup and print driver installation are supported on both – Windows and macOS*.

Create and upload the print driver configuration for each system and let the Desktop Client deal with the rest.

A compatible print driver is automatically installed depending on the system the logged-in MDC user is running on.

^{*MyQ Desktop for macOS might not be available at the time of initial launch of MyQ 10.2}

 

It is not enough to set up printers once and never touch them again. You might need to make changes over time – create new print queues as you add new devices and adjust driver settings for different scenarios and users.

Every time you make changes and update drivers in MyQ: removing users from or adding them to a queue, deployed printers are automatically updated.

 

How to Start Print Driver Deployment

Prepare the print drivers you want to use and capture them with the MyQ Desktop Client in a configuration profile. Assign the configuration profile to selected queues. The Desktop Client will install new printers pointing at the selected queues, automatically in the background, with no distractions to the user.

Summary of Deployment Configuration

Install Printers and Drivers Based on Security Groups

A print queue becomes accessible on a computer when the user, who has the right to print to this queue, logs into the Desktop Client. You can make use of this feature by creating security groups.

You can restrict the rights to specific queues to one or more security groups. By doing so, only the members of these security groups will have access to the queue. Other users not included in these groups will not be able to access the queue.

Need Different Drivers for Windows and MacOS?

You can capture a driver for every supported platform in one configuration profile. MyQ Desktop Client will install the correct driver automatically.

When needed, you can set up the same printing defaults on drivers for both Windows and macOS, or you can use different printing defaults for each platform.

Need Printers with Different Defaults in One Queue?

Create different configuration profiles with various printing defaults and utilize them in a single queue. Users can use two different printers with distinct printing defaults, which both print to the same queue.

When are Drivers Installed?

While the MyQ Desktop Client is active, it remains connected to the MyQ Print Server and updates its configuration regularly. If you modify the print driver configuration profile, the Desktop Client will update the printers in a short time, the next time a user logs into the Desktop Client or during computer startup.

Users can also manually update their printer list with a single click in the MyQ Desktop Client.

Start with Automatic Printer Provisioning

Continue to the Deployment guide on Printer Provisioning with the MDC, check out the MDC’s Overview where you learn what else the Desktop Client helps with, and we recommend having a look at the MDC manuals (Windows and macOS).