Microsoft has joined the trend of directly supporting printing from the cloud, confirming once again that cloud printing is truly the future of printing. In this post, we share insights on what Microsoft Universal Print is, while looking at the Microsoft Universal Print setup, pricing structure and supported printers.
Universal Print from Microsoft is an Azure service which lets Windows machines send print jobs via a cloud print service to printers with the Universal Print service installed. For printers that don’t have the service installed, a Universal Print Connector can be installed on a local print server.
The Printer Working Group protocol is used for printing. The print job is stored temporarily in the cloud, then the client is informed via notification, and the print job is downloaded and processed. The printers can be provided with extensive location information so that they can be found. For a printer to be found by the user, the device must be marked as findable in Universal Print’s admin portal.
Microsoft Universal Print is part of the following subscriptions:
However, while Microsoft 365 E3, E5 users have access to 100 print jobs per month, other licences only allocate for 5 print jobs per user per month. If print volumes are higher, businesses can purchase Universal Print page packs.
Microsoft Universal Print Pricing: Universal Print print job packages
Customers can add additional volume add-on packages. These are available in units of 500 or 10,000 with a 500-unit package costing $25 per month. At approximately 5 pages per print job, this is roughly equivalent to the cost of paper.
To use Universal Print, you need printer models that already support Universal Print. For all other printers, especially existing, in-market printers, a Universal Print Connector is required to include them in cloud printing.
Unfortunately, Universal Print will not work with all printer models. It is possible to check the list of Microsoft Universal Print supported printers online and see if a printer is Universal Print Ready – i.e if your printer model supports native Universal Print registration without a connector. Another option is to check if your printers are compatible with the Microsoft’s connector software. Third-party connectors with wider printer support are also available on the market. More information can also be found in our free E-Book below.
Once you have fulfilled the prerequisites, activated universal print in your tenant and acquired an always on PC on which it is to be installed, you are ready to install the connector, register printers and finally share these with your users.
A full walkthrough of initial Microsoft Universal Print setup can be found in this free E-Book.
With the Universal Print Connector by ezeep, an easy-to-use and cost-effective hardware device is available, so that Windows print servers can be completely omitted.
ezeep would not be ezeep if we left it at just supporting the Microsoft solution.
What additional advantages does ezeep Blue offer compared to Microsoft’s Universal Print solution?
Specific, but not limited, to Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365:
In addition, ezeep Blue offers:
