Is Your Universal Print driver REALLY UNIVERSAL???

March 8, 2010

Follow me printing, follow you printing, secure printing, or rules based routing…. for these to work correctly we need to have EITHER all the same type of Printers OR a Universal Print Driver. Since I don’t know any company that has all the same model(s) of Printers or MFDs, lets look at the Universal Print Driver option.

A range of standard and optional software and MEAP-based solutions (including AirPrint, Mopria, Universal Print by Microsoft®, Canon PRINT Business, and uniFLOW Online) are available to provide printing from mobile devices or internet-connected devices and cloud-based services depending on your requirements. NT-ware Device Support uniFLOW is an extensive software platform designed to connect and help manage printers from different manufacturers. Whilst the complete functionality is supported and confirmed for all Canon iR and imageRUNNER Advance devices, uniFLOW and the uniFLOW Universal Driver can support, manage and account PS, PCL5 and PCL6/XL printers from a wide range of different manufacturers.

What is a “Universal Print Driver”? For starters there are two flavors; Postscript or PCL. I will spare you all the gory details but let’s just say that these are two different printer languages. But once we have a PCL Universal Driver or a PS Universal driver what do you actually have? That depends on who you ask.

You may only be able to determine the capabilities of your vendors “Universal Print Driver” by asking a series of pointed questions. Why, you ask is this necessary? Because different vendors use the same term BUT mean different things by it. If we are going to have an intelligent conversation, it is incumbent upon us to first define our terms.

What the Vendors want you to think of when you hear the term “Universal Print Driver” is a single print driver that will print to any printer, right? Not so fast. The Sales guy will tell you that “YES we have a UNIVERSAL PRINT DRIVER”, and “A UNIVERSAL PRINT DRIVER CAN PRINT TO DIFFERENT MANUFACTURER’S PRINTERS”. So you say that is great we can load one driver on our end users PCs and they can print to various printers correctly (Oh no, you added the word “correctly”, Huston we have a problem).

This is where we separate the men from the boys when it comes to “Universal Print Drivers”. Once you purchase a solution that says it will provide a Universal Print Driver and you begin to impliment said solution you meet the system integrator (the technical guy) and you ask him the following questions, you may find out that the “Universal Print Driver” that his company sold you is not so Universal. What? Really? How come the Sales Person didn’t tell me this? (owwww…..That is the sound of me biting my tongue).

I am a fan of people making a fully informed decision. I am not a fan of misleading terms. So Let’s define a REAL UNIVERSAL PRINT DRIVER as one that (once the language is picked PCL or PS) it can print to any printer that supports that language (PCL or PS). Then it begs the question, does the “Universal Print Driver” that your vendor is pushing meet this standard? Here is a hint, don’t ask your sales person, ask their Systems Engineer, and make them look you in the eye when they answer.

Q1. Is it possible with your vendors Universal Print Driver to print to ANY make or model printer on your companies network and have it print correctly?

If they answer Yes to the above question please follow up with Q2 to see if they are lying.

Q2.How do you ensure that the user will get the output that they are expecting if there job is routed to a different Make or Model Printer than they originally chose?

What normally happens at this point is you find out the limitation of your vendors (not so) Universal Print driver. One vendor’s technical documentation states “If you want a print job generated for one printer to output successfully on another printer YOU must ensure that the other printer can understand all of the print commands included in the data stream from the driver.” A different vendor states that “the system does NOT check that the spool queues you select have compatible drivers, you must ensure this yourself”

What they are actually saying is that their Universal Print Driver is very limited. And unless YOU make sure that all of the printers that your end users want to print to are all compatible that their follow me you print solution is NOT going to work well.

So you ask…What is the alternative? Don’t all these follow me, follow you, secure printing solution all have this limitation? NO! The Canon UniFLOW solution has a TRUE, REAL UNIVERSAL PRINT DRIVER. Please ask Q1. The Answer is Yes! Now ask Q2. to see if we are lying. The answer is the Canon UniFLOW solution does NOT apply specific printer commands UNTIL the job is called for from the specific printer the end user wants to release the job at. So YOU do NOT have to ensure that each printer understands the print commands of another printer. The Canon UniFLOW Universal Print Driver is truly a UNIQUE UNIVERSAL PRINT DRIVER! Because the printer commands are not applied until the job is released you can change the properties when you release it (B&W to COLOR, Simplex to Duplex, etc.)

Canon Uniflow Universal Print Drivers Download

Don’t let your sales person say oh yeah, universal print driver, yep! We have that too! Press them to define their terms so that you will know just how Universal (or not) their Universal Print Driver really is.

Canon Uniflow Universal Print Drivers Download

That’s My $0.02
Vince McHugh
vince.mchug@necs.biz
WWW.NECS.BIZ