The Printer Solutions

[shawnsong]

Hey folks,

Today I wanted to address another topic that I have heard people  ask about quite often - network printers and how to deal with them in a business environment! 

Don’t get me wrong, dealing with the printers can still be a bit challenging (but fun!). The experience does vary from brand to brand, and the similarities between various brands can be hard to find when you run into issues. 

Here are a few options to make printing easier when using JumpCloud to manage your environment. After spending some time validating 2 solutions, I present them to you starting with the ideal and likely easiest to deploy option first. Let’s jump straight in!

Solution #1 - Recommended
3rd Party Cloud Printing Solution Integration

Here is a table of various cloud-hosted printing solutions we have evaluated and the various capabilities of each.

Product	SAML	OIDC / oAuth	LDAP	SCIM	Other	Note
Printix	✅	❌	✅	❌	GWS O365 AD OneLogin Email	Only prebuilt integrations supported, JC is able to work through GWS / O365 /AD integrations indirectly.
PrinterLogic	✅	✅(Google Only)	✅	✅	N.A	Tested and validated work with JC.
PaperCut NG / MF	✅	❌	✅	❌	Windows Auth MSFT SQL Svr WebAuth Okta LDAP Sync JumpCloud LDAP Sync	On-prem product. PaperCut Auth
PaperCut Hive	❓	❓	❓	❓	AAD GWS	Integrate with ADD / GWS via add-on Unknown if other auth methods are supported.
Google Cloud Print	❓	✅(Google Only)	❓	❓	GWS	Google no longer supports Google Cloud Print as of December 31, 2020.

There are likely more options available, what is listed above are the most common solutions out there.  As long as a cloud based printing solution supports one of the following authentication and provisioning methods (SAML / OIDC / LDAP / SCIM) then it is most likely you can  integrate it with JumpCloud.

Solution #2 - Advanced standalone solution.
Install Printers Remotely with JumpCloud Commands

TL;DR - You can find the code with the instruction here. 

We have only worked this out with the universal drivers for the following brands at this moment:

• HP
• Canon
• Brother

How-To

• Create a Jumpcloud Command.
• Select Windows, Powershell.
• Edit the "#Building the Printer Parameters" section in "cmdTemplate.ps1" to meet your specific needs, then paste it into the Ccommand body.
• Set the Timeout to 2000 seconds.
• In the files section of the Command, upload "MasterPrnRepo.psm1", make sure the path is "C:\Windows\Temp\MasterPrnRepo.psm1"
• Bind the Command to a device or device group and run it!

P.S. As you might noticed I have used a class in a module (.psm1 file) - If you are curious about how it works, I have wrote a blog dived deeper into this topic.

That's it for now - we will keep exploring this topic and probably do more posts about it!

A special shoutout to @BrightRodger who helped me greatly working on this post, Thanks Rodger!

Let me know your thoughts in the comments pls!