Neil's MetaXenFrame AppScalerServer ramblings

Talk to any Citrix administrator about printers and before long (s)he'll break out in a cold sweat and start mumbling about drivers, blue screens of death and replication issues. Count yourself lucky if they havn't broken down sobbing "why me, why me" within five minutes.

I've been aware of the HP Universal Drivers for some time, but it's been one of those things thats always been a "I must give that a try one day" and more important things have come along (like those pesky new XenApp versions and OS upgrades...)

So, with my latest implementation, I decided to dedicate some development time to give it a serious try - and the results so far have been very favourable.

Now, don't get confused between the HP Universal Drivers and the Citrix UPD - they are too different beasts although work in similar ways. The HP Universal Drivers support a wide range of HP printers (most of the commonly deployed ones fortunately) and come in PCL5, PCL6 and Postscript flavours. The drivers have functionality that query the features a printer has (duplex, colour, trays etc) and adapt the settings dialogs accordingly. The Citrix UPD (depending on which version) acts as a generic printer and sends its output to the client for the native driver to provide the "features" specific to the actual printer.

To complicate things even more, Citrix have several flavours of their UPD; some of which are based upon a HP driver - confused yet?!

The installation went smoothly onto the designated replication source XenApp server. So too did the StressPrinters test that I always perform on any new printer driver introduced into the environment.

So far, I've managed to avoid installing another 12 HP drivers having mapped all the various HP client-side drivers in use to the same "HP Universal Printing PCL6/PS" using the CMC mapping feature.

One thing I (and users) noticed is there is a new notication Pop-up in the bottom right-hand of the screen (very much like the Outlook "New email" notification) that notifies about print job completion, and any errors that occur. The default setting is to notify on all types of events (success, warnings and errors) and users did start to find it annoying constantly being told a printer was low on toner or one of the paper trays was empty.

Fortunately, HP provide an ADM file for configuring all aspects of the universal driver via GPO. Because this environment uses RES PowerFuse for user environment management, I was quickly able to import the ADM H provide and create a configuration job that disabled most of the annoying warnings. You can also use the ADM to configure default print settings such as duplex and quality.

As an aside, some readers may be interested how we are optimising print traffic. We have a small utility to re-map the client-side print queues to direct IP from the server. This is very similar to the session printers feature native to XenApp, but doesn't require a print server to work as it enumerates all the client-side printers in the session and re-maps the ones it recognises via a direct IP port. This allows print traffic to flow outside of ICA, and thus be optimised by our WAN accelerators. Of course, if you are lucky enough to have Citrix WANScalers, they might be able to optimise ICA one day soon.

So, if you're environment is an explosion of different HP printers (and most I've worked in are) give the HP Universal Driver a spin - you won't be dissapointed!