Terminal Services Printing

[welsh blackbird]

Is there a way to simplify the setting up of local printers so that they can print when connected to a server over Terminal Services using Remote Desktop?

At the moment we have people working from home. They all use different printers; some centronics, some USB and some scanner/printer/copier gismos. The driver for each printer needs to be installed on the server and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't!

What we need is some software that will work with any printer, however connected, and independent of the driver.

Does such software exist? (It needs to be cheap!)

Cheers

[plasticpig]

Thinprint .print RDP does what you want. Its not that cheap though at over £1000.

[_deejay_]

welsh blackbird said:

Is there a way to simplify the setting up of local printers so that they can print when connected to a server over Terminal Services using Remote Desktop?

At the moment we have people working from home. They all use different printers; some centronics, some USB and some scanner/printer/copier gismos. The driver for each printer needs to be installed on the server and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't!

What we need is some software that will work with any printer, however connected, and independent of the driver.

Does such software exist? (It needs to be cheap!)

Cheers

I suppose it depends on how you want to deal with it. If they're doing simple printing tasks (no double sided/colour stuff) then you can just tell TS to use a generic driver (albeit on a printer by printer basis, based on it's name)

Failing that (assuming you're using Windows 2003 sp1) you can failback to a default print driver when the server doesn't have one - explained here: http://searchwinit.techtarget.com/qna

D

Edited by _deejay_ on Tuesday 4th July 21:58

[spivvy]

I have a similar problem also in that
you can't link the session to the static printer
also the printer on the terminal server keeps going offline