This issue is difficult to illustrate if you aren’t familiar with how the Ricoh Aficio C2500 series printer operates and is setup in our office, so here is some necessary background.
All staff have an account on the Ricoh (which is not, in any way, connected to their domain account). So when they print to it from their desktop, the print job is stored and only printed when the user enters his/her credentials from the panel on the front of the Ricoh.
Example: Alice prints a document to the Ricoh. She walks to the printer, presses the document server button and selects her name from a list of other users who also have documents waiting to be printed. Once her name is selected, she enters her PIN, selects the document and presses print. The document is now printed. This is how its supposed to work.
Recently, since we upgraded to Office 2007, users printing documents created by others are unable to print these documents correctly. When the user sends the document to the Ricoh, instead of being stored under his/her username, it is stored under the name of the user who originally created the document. This occurs even if the user has edited and resaved the document to his/her desktop.
Example: From her desktop, Alice opens an Excel document stored on a network drive (or stored anywhere); she edits the document and saves the changes. Then she sends it to the Ricoh. When she walks over to the Ricoh to print it out, she discovers that it is not under her username. Instead, it has been stored under Bobs username. Bob originally created the Excel document for Alices department to use.
This occurs with all Office 2007 documents and all users. Any Office documents sent to the Ricoh appear under the name of the user who created the document instead of the user who printed the document.
This issue only occurs with Office 2007 documents. We had this issue sporadically with Publisher 2003, but at the time it wasn’t a priority.
I realize this may not be very clear, so please feel free to ask any questions.
This is probably a problem with metadata (extra data about the file) that Office 2007 has covertly saved in the document. One piece of metadata that is stored is the user name of the creator of the document. Perhaps removing this piece of metadata could help clear up this printing issue.
Microsoft has outlined the procedure for removing metadata from Office 2007 documents here.
The metadata idea seems like a good lead. If that doesn't pan out, I'd log into the Ricoh and make sure that someone didn't try to hook it into AD in some way. It seems very odd behavior for a device that's not supposed to be looking at the AD username and using its own instead.
Also, considering what they charge for those Ricoh maintenance plans, definitely check with your rep for an OS update on the printer. If Ricoh hasn't worked out a fix for Office 2007 yet, then (shame on them) you're within rights to raise a stink. Q3 2009 is WAY past the "how were we supposed to know" stage...
(any chance this only crops up for SP2?)