Navigate to Options/”Mobile & BYOD” and scroll down to Google Cloud Print. Login to the admin console using and use the default credentials provided from the documentation. For my test, I installed the application on my Windows Server with the Print Services role added. The installation is rather simple, so I won’t detail every step here. Start with a free trial download of PaperCut NG here: Now, to take a few steps back and detail how we set up printing to get to the point where we can share it with a group that is already configured properly. Then you will receive a notification like this one where I have shared a printer with a group named all-students. They must login to their Google account and navigate to Cloud Printing. This notification doesn’t come to the user as an email though. This is especially important for students so that they don’t each have to accept the sharing individually. The owner is important because when this is defined, this person can accept the shared printer on behalf of the entire group and it is automatically made available to all members of the group. I typically recommend defining the managedBy attribute in AD and then configure GCDS to map this to the group owner in the group sync configuration. You must define an owner to the Google group. We wrote up how to sync your AD groups with Google here, but there is an additional requirement for this to work well with printers. The most effective and simple way to share printers is with a Google group. PaperCut is a licensed product that does have a cost associated with it where the Google version is free.īefore we get into how to do this with PaperCut, it is important that another foundation be laid first. The simple solution is to just uninstall the Google version and use the PaperCut version. It can be very confusing like this example: It will duplicate every printer and you will not be able to tell the PaperCut one from the Google Cloud Print one. Note: Do not enable Google Cloud Print Service and PaperCut Google cloud printing on the same print server. As it turns out, they have their own solution to Google Cloud Print that works very well. There are a number of printing accounting solutions, but the defacto standard is PaperCut. There are always a small percentage of users that print a disproportionate amount of paper. On a very small scale, this might be acceptable, but it really isn’t when you make this available on a broader scale. All print jobs that are printed in this way, show the owner of the job as the user that was used to install and run the service on the windows server. I discovered my own challenge with the Google solution. This discussion has encouraged me to look deeper into how to make this work well for a school district. Looking to take the hassle out of Student Provisioning? You can view the thread here if you are a member. From trouble with browser versions to IT personnel having to delete and reinstall printers every few days, Google Print has presented many challenges. There has been a lot of chatter recently one the Technology Coordinator Listserv hosted by the Ohio Department of Education about issues with the Google Cloud Print Service. This can be installed on a Windows server that is serving printers to windows workstations and turn any and all of these printers into Google Cloud printers that can be shared with users and printed to from Chrome devices, even from mobile phones. Google offers a solution with their “Google Cloud Print Service” that is available here: So then, we must have a solution for managing this in a way that is sensible. My experience is that everyone thinks that they will no longer need to print, but they find later that it isn’t completely true. One of them is the idea that if we can share and collaborate on everything in the cloud, then we can avoid printing so much paper. There are lots of reasons that Google Apps for Education has caught on and been adopted by so many school districts.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |