I have a computer work lab, it is a simple LAN with no real internet access. It started out as only a few PC's (years ago) and when it was just 4 or less the admin's did everything local on each pc manually. Now we have over 10 pc's and a windows domain server was setup to facilitate managing 10+ pc's.
Picture one large room, 10 win10 PC's and a domain server off to the side, and a network printer.
Issue we are having is it seems any user (in their profile?) can have any number of network printers show up, and when you select any one of them they don't work it gives some kind of error. And it's nearly always the same xerox printer name & mac showing up but then you see something like copy of. Now the printer does work, people can successfully print to it provided they have enough computer knowledge on how to set that up on whichever PC they are sitting at at the time. But it is often frustrating... and having gone from win2000 to winxp to win7 to win8 to win10....
is it too much to ask that for any user new or existing on this little LAN with a Windows 2016 domain server that just one printer show up cleanly in devices & printers, and all anybody should have to do is do File - Print and it simply prints ?
How do you make the following happen?
- For any user who logs into a client PC on this little LAN having a Windows Domain Server, they see only one printer under devices & printers
- The User does not have to do anything other than mouse click File - Print. Mouse click file print always works!
You can install a commercial solution like Ricoh Print&Share.
Either choose to install P&S on each desktop pc (and have the profiles set centrally). or install P&S on the server and share the printer.
This way they will only print to one printer and as an administrator you can configure P&S to print to whatever printer you like. In case you apply printing strategy you can print to a different printer in case one is down or apply load balancing etc...
(note: i'm affiliated with the software/company).