Our IT consultants have been receiving enquiries recently about why workers can’t print like normal with Windows Virtual Desktop in home office.
To refer to one example, a service provider based in Ireland wanted to utilize Windows Virtual Desktop for their remote workers in home office, yet struggled to understand why they couldn’t print from a remote desktop to a local printer.
The increase in interest is a logical consequence of recent developments. For a lot of companies, finding a way to react to COVID-19 is currently critical to their future. A lucky few have been able to reduce the current disruption by shifting their processes into the cloud and enabling their teams to continue working from home.
It therefore comes as no surprise that Microsoft reported last week a huge increase in users across their portfolio of cloud-based services. The video communication tool Teams saw a huge increase in users, as did the reporting tool PowerBi. Microsoft’s remote desktop solution – Windows Virtual Desktop – also saw its usage triple. Obviously, those that already started deploying are putting the new DaaS offering to good use.
What if I don’t already have WVD set up?
So what about the organizations that are thinking about deploying, but haven’t already? Is it possible to react to the current pandemic and get WVD up and running now?
Based on our experience, deploying Windows Virtual Desktop is something that certainly takes a bit of planning, time and consideration when building. Unfortunately, the current circumstances make this quite difficult. One factor that prevents the swift deployment of Windows Virtual Desktop is that the cloud-based Azure Active Directory handles the permissions your users have. Companies that already had Azure Active Directory in place are therefore best placed to react immediately to the situation.
Printing is another hurdle to jump over
While some companies have been wondering if that can spontaneously stand up a remote desktop environment during the current situation, those that already have encountered new problems, like how to enable users to print from a remote desktop to a local printer. The difficultly here is that every printer suddenly becomes a remote printer with WVD.
While the default printing support for Windows Virtual Desktop won’t be sufficient for your organization (from a management perspective) or users (from a performance point of view), it is very easy to augment existing Windows Virtual Desktop environments with our excellent printing support tool ezeep.
In our interview with Scott Seddon, Senior Technical Consultant at ezeep and ThinPrint, we go into Windows Virtual Desktop printing in more detail. Luckily, ezeep can be remotely deployed with ease via the ezeep connector or ezeep print app.
The existing local printers which your users have at home can be made available in WVD by the ezeep connector on the user’s laptop. This automatically discovers the printers and makes them securely addressable from the cloud. There isn’t much more to the process than that; if the WVD prerequisites are in place, getting your users to print from a remote desktop to a local printer with ezeep is straightforward.
Want to print from a remote desktop to a local printer? Try ezeep
For the businesses and organizations that want their workers to be able to print like normal, WVD’s default printing option is insufficient. By adding ezeep to your WVD-environment, printing is made easy and secure for everyone. To learn more about ezeep’s solution for Windows Virtual Desktop, check out our dedicated page.