Sanity check: Print Server upgrade
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@scottalanmiller said:
It makes initial conversations harder because we are more like a fancy restaurant than a McDonald's. They rarely can just pick a combo meal or a Prix Fixe but need to look at the menu and figure out the appetizer, entree, salad and dessert that they want.
We just had this same internal discussion. We are working on changing our marketing and this was the largest part of our discussion. How to market a service that is not commodity. I did not think about the fast food comparison. Going to email some new thoughts on that shortly.
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I have some sympathy with my vendor, and I guess you're in the same boat. Although they've done a lot of work for me in the past, they don't own my environment in the way that they own the environment of most of their managed clients. For most of their clients, they'd have provided and installed all the printers. In my case, they're walking into an environment that they are fairly unfamiliar with. That creates risks on their part.
Having said, I generally pay on a time and materials basis, so the risk is mostly mine, not theirs. But I suspect they have made massive provisions for "unexpected snags" on quoting for this project.
It makes outsourcing a problem for me. It is easy to go the whole managed service route, and doing that eliminates many of the risks for the vendor and the client - they provide the environment and the hardware so they don't have any surprises on site.
It is easy to do everything in-house, for the same reason, I provide the environment so don't have any surprises. But finding a middle ground, where I'm working in collaboration with the vendor - that is tricky and something I clearly haven't succeeded in based on a 4 day quote for a stupid effing print server upgrade!
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@scottalanmiller said:
Bring in @thanksajdotcom he's the go to printer guy.
Where is he? Is he still posting on ML? It looks like I'm going to do this project myself and I might live-blog my progress, but I could really do with an expert on hand to help me
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I'll be following these instructions:
http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/77664-so-you-need-to-deploy-printers-with-group-policy-windows-2012-r2 -
Definitely post questions here. It helps this community grow in it's IT cred by having as many questions posted as possible.
And of course, we want to help.
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@Dashrender said:
Definitely post questions here. It helps this community grow in it's IT cred
It doesn't if your answers are crap
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@Dashrender said:
Definitely post questions here. It helps this community grow in it's IT cred
It doesn't if your answers are crap
Love the faith man, love the faith... lol
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@Dashrender Thank you for the help. I truly appreciate it!
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@Minion-Queen said:
@Dashrender Thank you for the help. I truly appreciate it!
Thanks - I do want to see this community grow into something like where most of us came from. Well the same in respects to all of the technical questions and answers.
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Well it is appreciated. This has not been an easy process for us and we want to see it grow but slowly so we try not to make mistakes. Try being the operative word
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Bring in @thanksajdotcom he's the go to printer guy.
Where is he? Is he still posting on ML? It looks like I'm going to do this project myself and I might live-blog my progress, but I could really do with an expert on hand to help me
I'll ping him. He's been pretty busy as of late.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Bring in @thanksajdotcom he's the go to printer guy.
Where is he? Is he still posting on ML? It looks like I'm going to do this project myself and I might live-blog my progress, but I could really do with an expert on hand to help me
I'll ping him. He's been pretty busy as of late.
Better busy, than bored, right?
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I did reach out to him. Hopefully he sees it.
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I haven't read all the posts, so forgive me if this is a repeat...
For fifteen printers, assuming most printers you can get the drivers for pretty easily, you're looking at 10 minutes/printer to get the printer setup, shared and the drivers added. That's a bit generous too, but assumes you have decent bandwidth for downloads, etc.
To setup the actual print server, that's pretty quick and I don't even think the roles being added require a reboot. Half an hour? An hour tops. That's assuming the base server is already setup. Most people add this kind of role to a DC, etc.
Lastly, coordinating what users/groups get what printers means coordinating with you. They can get all the IPs and models from the old server pretty easily. I would say, being generous in case you have some printers whose drivers are tough to track down and if they run into any issues, 10 hours tops. The biggest pain is going to be removing the old printers from the computers so you can make sure people aren't printing to old shares.
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I should add that I'm not dead, I'm sorry I'm late to the game, and I hope what I posted helps.
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Thanks. I do have some specific questions for you
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Which driver(s) do I need to install on the server. Should I just install the 2012R2 driver, or do I need to additionally install the Windows 7 driver?
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What is the difference between drivers for 2012R2, 8, 8.1 and 7. 2012R2 uses the Windows 8 kernel doesn't it? So is the driver actually the same?
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Am I ok to use the HP Universal Print Driver, or am better using specific HP printer drivers?
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If I tick "Render the print jobs on client computers", is the 2012R2 driver actually being used? Or is all the processing being done on the Windows 7 clients? Should I tick this box (it's the default, so I am assuming the answer is yes)? And if the clients are doing the rendering, what is my vendor on about when he says there may be compatibility issues with 2012R2? If the Windows 7 clients can print now via 2003, under what circumstances could they have an issue printing to 2012R2?
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If anyone else wants a stab at answering my questions, feel free. Don't be shy.
Regarding question 2 - Océ offer a Windows 7 Windows Printer Driver (WPD), which says it is optimised for AutoCAD (this sounds like a good thing), but there is no WPD driver for Windows 8 or 2012R2. The latter only have a PostScript 3 Driver.
So which do I install? I want to install the Windows 7 WPD driver. Will this be possible?
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- In order to install the printer on the server, you'll have to install the driver specific for that server. It's less of a problem today, but in the past vendors would sometimes make a specific driver for a specific OS, and the driver would specify that it only worked with, say XP or Windows 2000. If you have older hardware you could run into this problem. If you run into this problem, you'll have to add the specific OS drivers to the Windows Server Driver Library so it can be pushed down to the clients. But as I mentioned earlier, that's pretty uncommon these days. The only way to know for sure is to test. Install all 15 printers worth of drivers on your new print server, then get a client computer that has no printers installed and manually add them all - any that give you grief will require you to install alternative versions on the server.
Another thing to keep in mind. Server 2012R2 is x64 only. If your clients are x86, you'll almost certainly have to install the x86 drivers to the server as an add-on to the driver library.
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Today, generally the drivers are all the same
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Personally I despise universal drivers. I've seen them work, but I've also seen them fail miserably. Something else to keep in mind, universal drivers will lack some advanced features. If you use those features, you'll have to use the specific driver.
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I don't know
2a) If the WPD can't be installed on the server, then most likely you'll have to manually push that driver out. Drivers have a unique code that allows Windows to link like but not identical drivers together. This is how you can deploy x86 drivers from a x64 server, these codes match. If the WPD code matches the 2012R2 standard driver, and the standard driver also supports Windows 7, I'm not sure the server would push out your WPD over the standard driver that 2012 is using (that is assuming you could even install it into the driver library)
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Thanks. I do have some specific questions for you
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Which driver(s) do I need to install on the server. Should I just install the 2012R2 driver, or do I need to additionally install the Windows 7 driver?
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What is the difference between drivers for 2012R2, 8, 8.1 and 7. 2012R2 uses the Windows 8 kernel doesn't it? So is the driver actually the same?
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Am I ok to use the HP Universal Print Driver, or am better using specific HP printer drivers?
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If I tick "Render the print jobs on client computers", is the 2012R2 driver actually being used? Or is all the processing being done on the Windows 7 clients? Should I tick this box (it's the default, so I am assuming the answer is yes)? And if the clients are doing the rendering, what is my vendor on about when he says there may be compatibility issues with 2012R2? If the Windows 7 clients can print now via 2003, under what circumstances could they have an issue printing to 2012R2?
1, Server 2012 R2 is the driver but in case that's lacking, work backwards, starting with Server 2012, Windows 8.1, Windows 8 and Windows 7.
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Most are pretty similar or the same. It depends on the printer.
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The UPD is good and the only option for some printers but my philosophy has always been the actual printer specific driver whenever possible.
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This renders the spool on the client machine instead of the server. So instead of spooling via the server, it spools on each workstation. The advantage is if the spooler for one machine crashes, it doesn't bring everyone down. The downside is if you need to restart a spooler, and it's happening on multiple machines, you have to touch each machine. Still, I prefer to render it on the workstation whenever possible.
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