How to manage printers in couple of locations, many x factors

Question

Hi,

I have one conundrum which I would like to solve. Ever since I started to work in the new company we have a situation where we install printers for our colleges with a batch script! This drivers me crazy as I am the one who does this as soon as the new machine is setup with SCCM.
The reason why we do this in this old fashion way is because most of the colleagues need printers not just from their original home location, lets call it location A, but they also need printers from location B (remote office). And like this was not enough, there are also some printers in the secretary office who are for example not used by colleges from other departments while they have their own printer or their do not work on the same floor as the other colleges.
Additional we have "roaming" colleagues with laptops who need printers depending on the office location where they are on that day. I mean there is really a handful of factors and GPO is not flexible enough to cover all of this.

If I would deploy ALL the printers from all offices, with a GPO, we are talking about let's say, 15 printers which is not so much, but they are setup all as 1x color, and 1x black & white. So, instead of 15 we have 30 printers.

For me an ideal solution would be a printer management software which sits in the taskbar and then the user can select the office and all of the printers in that office with one click.

Suggestions appreciated

Answer 1

Hello @Tonito Dux

Have you considered about Universal Print?
it runs entirely on Azure and uses Azure AD, with no local infrastructure required in most cases.

How to configure Universal Print
https://azurescene.com/2020/04/10/how-to-configure-universal-print/

What's new in Universal Print
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/universal-print/whats-new

Portal of universal print:

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Best Regards
Karlie

Answer 2

Hi Karlie,

I thought I already wrote the answer, but ok. I will explore this option, thank you for your suggestion.

Cheers!