Location based printing - best practice?

[eyesonlyone]

Hey guys,

i'm wondering how you guys handle location based printing in your horizon view environment.

Printers in our environment are centrally managed on a Windows 2012 R2 printserver.

Currenty we are creating a printer object for each printer within UEM9. We also create a condition set for each client based on the "ViewClient_Machine_Name" variable.

Then we are using these condition sets for printer assignment.

I wonder if there is any performance impact if the number of printers/condition sets ascends as each client has to check each printer rule and its conditions.

Generally this seems not as a very clean solution to me, moreover it requires not just a little effort.

Any tips? How do you guys handle this?

Glad to hear from you guys!

eyesonly

[Smoke14]

The best way to handle location printing is to subnet/vLAN your locations and then assign your printers static IP's, as usual, then condition your UEM printer entries with the IP's subnet/vLAN.

But your way and others will work. The goal is to reduce management, your up front work for the network team and your own team might be a little more, but it's worth it in the long run.

[eyesonlyone]

The problem is, that we have too much printers in each subnet/vlan so that is no possibility.

On each location(vlan/subnet) we have several computers that have different requirements concerning the available printers.

We are a clinical institution. So lets say we have one vlan on 1 ward. In this ward they have  a central printer and additional printers in every surgery/doctors office.

Every client in the doctors room's should only get the corresponding printer of that room.

I hope you can conceive what i mean.

[Smoke14]

Yah, that becomes more a challenge. You need to have every room on its own subnet to make management of printers easier.

Are the computer devices mobile (moved room to room) and the printers I'm assuming are stationary in each room?

If that is the scenario, I would look at something like ThinPrint Personal Printing solution that could be your best option for that type of use case under one subnet or large subnet with multiple printers – also known as follow-me-printing or secure printing. I'm not saying it can't be done with UEM alone, just going to be a lot more configuration and management of your printer environment.

If the devices are dedicated to the rooms also, then you could make them static IP's or Prefix/Suffix the machine names that can be leveraged in the UEM conditions.