Can we install one printer that prints to different printers depending on which location/office an employee is in?

Question

Hopefully, I'm describing this sufficiently, but let me know if there's any additional context I can provide. I work for a non-profit that has 13 different physical office locations. Each location has two printers (let's call them printer1 and printer2). There's no intranet that goes across all of the sites. Right now, each employee's laptop then basically has 26 printers installed -- 2 for each site. Assuming that all the printers are able to share a driver somehow, what's the best way to have just 2 printers installed on each laptop and when you print to printer1 or printer2, they just print to whichever network they're currently connected to?

Thanks!

Use the same IP subnet at each site, and give the printers the same address. You'll be stuck in driver hell though. — SpacemanSpiff, Aug 22 '14 at 19:35
I thought about doing that or maybe some kind of on-site DNS server? — mteng, Aug 24 '14 at 22:46

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 22 '14 at 22:24

0

There is no generic solution which would work.

But if you happen to have HP's printers which may use the HP Universal Print Driver, setting the UPD up in Dynamic mode would give you a very similar feature - the driver would auto-detect printers in its neighborhood and you would not need install every possible printer as a separate print queue in Windows.

answered Aug 22 '14 at 22:24

the-wabbit

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I'll take a look into the Dynamic mode. We don't actually have HP printers. They're mostly Konica Minolta photocopiers/printers, but maybe there's something similar with those drivers. – mteng Aug 24 '14 at 22:47

Can we install one printer that prints to different printers depending on which location/office an employee is in?

1 Answers1