Microsoft 365 Community Microsoft Graph, 19 Oct 2021

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From YouTube: Introduction to Universal Print

Description

In this 17-minute developer-focused demo, Rachelle Cheung introduces viewers to tools for better Print management. Get the lay-of-the-land - customer challenges, Universal Print solution and architecture. Technology requirements/licensing, Universal Print ecosystem and security + privacy details. Demos of Universal Print for IT Admins (register, share, manage) and for end users (discover, add printer, print). Create custom solutions on top of managed print services via the Graph API. This PnP Community demo is taken from the weekly Microsoft 365 Platform Community call recorded on October 19, 2021.

Demo Presenter: Rachelle Cheung (Microsoft)

Supporting materials:
• Article - Introducing the Universal Print PowerShell module | http://aka.ms/UPPowershell
• Article - Universal Print Lunch & Learn series | https://aka.ms/UPLunchAndLearn
• Documentation - Universal Print cloud printing API overview | https://aka.ms/UPGraphDocs
• Demo - MS Build SK118 Add cloud-based printing to your application with Universal Print | https://aka.ms/UP_GraphAPIDemo
• Feedback – Universal Print | https://aka.ms/UPCommunity

Learn more:
• Learn more about the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices community at: http://aka.ms/m365pnp
• Visit the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices community YouTube channel: https://aka.ms/m365pnp/videos

A

Hi everyone, um my name, is rochelle chung and I'm a program manager on the universal print team. So today I'll be walking you through just the basics of universal print, my 15 minutes, so I won't be able to get through too much but I'll try to give you the overview of what universal print is um and how you could potentially make use of that.

A

um So there are this stuff here um I'll be covering some. You know overviews some requirements, the universal print ecosystem security and I think you might have time for universal print for iit, but we'll see how much we can get through today. um So the shift to the cloud has transformed the way you work. So it's a lot of productivity and teamwork to thrive, but we've heard from a lot of customers that challenges still persists when it comes to print management.

A

So for it a lot of print management has meant dealing with printer configuration, on-premises print servers and printer drivers, and it really consumes a lot of it and it resources and time and additionally, on azure active directory joint devices. People had to print through a very complex, hybrid setup.

A

In a lot of the cases, it lacks a comprehensive view into the print environment, so it's difficult to see which employees are printing, how much they're, printing and from where. So with all these users and printers a lot of organizations need more visibility and control into print management.

A

For a lot of end users, it can be very frustrating to always try to print, but then not being able to install the right drivers or having to scroll through an endless list of printers so a lot of times they struggle to locate the printers that they have access to that are close enough for them to print to.

A

So we understand that at the moment there are a lot of french users that are on the go and they move from different buildings or different sites around the world. So it's really important that we have location based printing capabilities and that's where universal print comes in, so with the old solution, printers have been traditionally installed on a print server and published in active directory.

A

So when a user, that's logged onto an active directory, join machine, searches for printers active directory is searched and the published printers are found, but if the user's machines are joined to azure active directory, then there's no way for the machine to discover any of these printers at all.

A

In the past, there's this hybrid cloud print solution that's been used, but it's very, very complex. There's all these things you have to set up, and it's very difficult for admins to keep up to date and to configure correctly, especially at a global organization scale. So this is really kept organizations tied down to the on-premises infrastructure. It really makes it difficult to fully move to the cloud so with universal print, we're hoping to mitigate all these problems, so how a universal print works is very simple.

A

Once the it configures and registers printers in azure active directory, they can then publish the printers and assign printer access to the appropriate user groups. Users can then easily discover their sprinter, add the printer and then print immediately after that, on the admin side, the it is able to manage print and receive reports on printer usage.

A

Communication with universal print is based on the microsoft graph api and the internet printing protocol standard, which is also known as ipp on top of our base functionality of universal print. You can also use the microsoft graph api as a developer to develop additional features that you might need for your particular organization, so universal print is made up of four key components. The first one is universal print service, which you can see in the middle over here.

A

um The next is the client, which is like the windows client here. It's a universal print support is integrated in windows, 10 version 1903 onwards, and then the another two components are the universal print ready printer and the universal print connector. So how this works is on the left. We've got universal print, 90 printers, which have uh which are printers that have native support for universal print built into that particular printer. But we understand that a lot of people aren't able to take away all their printers and refurbish all of them and get new ones.

A

So with the universal print connector, you can use those with your legacy. Printers and you'll be able to connect to the universal print service through this, so the requirements for universal print are that you have to have a windows. 10 19 version, 1903 onwards, and the great thing about universal print is that it comes with a lot of the licenses or subscriptions that you already have so the universal print license is available on the left-hand side with these existing subscriptions. So you don't have to buy the universal print license on top of these subscriptions.

A

If you already have them, um so you can see it's a lot of the education enterprise and business um subscriptions here and also in case you're, an edu customer there's eu discounts as well. So each subscription comes with a pool of print jobs. You have five print jobs per license and then that's pooled into a print volume.

A

So anyone who has access to the pool will be able to print from that pool of print jobs, so one person can print like 50 print jobs, while another person prints zero, but it's based on like five print jobs per license and then, of course, you can purchase additional print jobs if you need to so there's the 500 print job and the 10 000 print jobs per month.

A

So, as I mentioned before, we have a lot of partners with that are partnered with universal print, so our ecosystem, our print ecosystem, is very rich with all these partnerships. A lot of these major printer manufacturers are actively working on hardware, with native support for universal print. So what I was mentioning before about the universal print ready printers.

A

Some of these already exist in market today and additional hardware manufacturers are creating more universal print, ready printers, and then we also have independent software vendors, who are developing print and output management solutions with universal print integration, and they do that using the microsoft graph api.

A

So this allows us to be able to provide that base infrastructure for everyone, and then people can build on top of that if they need to build additional features. So our universal print partner ecosystem is evolving pretty quickly. So if you ever need a more up-to-date list of all the integrations you can head on over to ak dot. Ms slash up integrations so in terms of security and privacy.

A

All of the organizational and personal data is handled in accordance with microsoft data management guidelines. So all data is stored securely in the cloud and backed by azure active directory certificates. So customer data is not stored or moved outside the tenant. Geography and printers are represented as azure active directory device objects backed by an x 509 certificate.

A

It can also control printer access, using azure, active directory and using security groups. So that means only people that have permission to print to a certain printer can print to that. um Other people won't be able to even see those printers at all. So, even if you have really sensitive data, you'll be able to make sure that only certain people can print to a certain printer and that no one's able to go in and see what data you have.

A

So I'd like to go through now and talk a bit about how universal print works for admins. um So I t time and resources are very valuable um and before, with printing, it's been a huge hassle for admins to be able to configure printers configure drivers and figure all that stuff out so with universal print. We've replaced the need for hybrid cloud print, so it's easier to configure printers and it's much more scalable everything's managed through a centralized azure portal.

A

So it allows you full visibility and insights into your current print environment and it can monitor printers print job history and generate usage reports.

A

Additionally, universal print allows for organizations to address specific business needs, so there's extensibility features that you can create using the graph api that enables building custom solutions on top of the managed print services, and that creates additional value for a lot of organizations.

A

You can also manage printers using the universal print. Powershell module, so a lot of administrators rely on scripting for bulk actions, so certain scheduled activities and repetitive activities like automatically applying defaults or assigning user permissions. So you can use um the upcom command lit with existing powershell functionality, and this makes universal print even more accessible because it bundles that into the existing azure portal environment.

A

So if you want more information about that, you can head on over to ak dot. Ms up powershell um and I'll now provide a demo of universal print management in the azure portal, so universal prints managed from the azure portal just like any other azure service, and this is the landing page for universal print. um It's hosted in azure and localized in all azure languages. So no matter where you're from you'll be able to read this in your language or language of preference, and so on the left hand side.

A

You can see that there are a lot of options available to it, admins to manage the service, so things like managing printers printer shares the connector. I was talking about earlier um document conversion and you can also have some reports on the left hand side.

A

So if we click on printers, you can see that there's a list of printers here that are available in the azure tenant. You can see the status of each of these printers, so here we have two printers that are registered with universal print, but they have not been shared with any users.

A

So to do that, we can click here to change the default view for these things, but you can also select one of the printers here. So here we'll select the laxmark c3224dw printer and then we can view the overview page for that particular lexmark printer.

A

So we have several options to choose from you can view the print jobs of the printer view, the printer properties change the access control things like that, so selecting on printer properties. We can see that there are several tabs to view about this particular printer on the first tab here, you'll see the printer properties. These are very just basic information about the printer, such as the make the model registration date. Things like that, so the cool thing about universal print is the location properties part that I've mentioned before.

A

So in this view, you can see that you can be very specific with what information you want to put about the location, so you can do the exact latitude and longitude if you want, um you can put in the building number the floor number and all of that, so let's say we put something in here. So this is the user's view on the end user end. So if you were to search for universal print printers, you can search them for location, and then this is the kind of you'd get so for this one.

A

It would be the microsoft building or the microsoft tenant. I guess, then, the tampa location building 42 floor three and here you'd be able to find that particular printer here that fits those requirements and you can quickly add that device.

A

So going back to the universal print portal, you can still see the printer properties for a specific lexmark printer. So when you go to the printer defaults tab, you can see that you can manage the printer default preference settings and let's go there, you can see all the print jobs for that particular printer that you collected.

A

So now that we've navigated, through the properties of the printer, all right, we're now in the print jobs and then, if we go here, we can also see the usage reports on the left-hand side. So before there's like a bunch of different tabs, I've mentioned um here, you can see the usage and reports. If you click here, you can see like the number of build print jobs, the pending print jobs, reading print jobs, total print capacity and the billing period end date.

A

So you can download these reports here, and this is what you would see so there's two types of reports that you can get the top one is the printer usage which contains the report, id printer id usage date and completed job count, and then the bottom report is user data. So that includes the report, id uh user principal name usage date and contains a lot of the job count as well as incomplete job count.

A

So I think that's it for now. Brian did you want to do questions to our after um nick goes.

B

Let's take a couple of questions now: okay, I did see a few in the chat on here. There was one around: um is this available in gcc tenants? That's our government cloud attendance.

A

Not at the moment.

B

Okay and then see there's one more that was in here. How do you address licensed guest printing scenarios.

A

We're investigating that option right now.

B

Okay and then there's a couple of questions and some feedback just regarding the the seated capacity that comes with the e5 a3, sorry e3, a3 or the e5 a5 licensing. Can you confirm that that was it was five print jobs per license, but then you can purchase add-on. Is that correct.

A

Correct it's five print jobs for a license that are pooled, and then you can purchase the additional. I believe it was 500 and 10k add-on packs if you need more print jobs. Okay, I can also sift through these questions. After.

B

And uh just for awareness you have about 20 minutes or so since we have only two talks today, so you can probably go till about 35 after the um after the hour.

A

Oh okay, cool. I have to unhide some of the slides I had. I think I'm ready to share the next part, um so I can go through a demo of what the user experience would look like. I think that could be useful for those on the call. So with universal print you can print effortlessly every time, which is the hope of what universal print does universal print makes it.

A

You know easy for admins makes it more efficient, but it also offers a simple, no learning curve experience for users so basically before there's been some difficulties with printing, but printing would be the exact same as what it was before, except just simpler and hopefully with not as many issues as people were having before it's the same printing method that your people can normally expect.

A

So here is the demo. So in this demo the it admin has already registered the printer to universal print and enabled specific user groups to use that so the end user. If they want to print a document on the printers and scanner settings page, they can click, add a printer or scanner and then they can discover nearby printers.

A

So when they do this, you can see that there's building 42 floor, 3 printer and that's based on their location services. So they do need to have that on in order to detect the printers that are nearby that they also have access to. And then, of course, if you want you can select, if you don't see the option you want, you can go to the printer that I want isn't listed or usually for universal print. You would search for printers in my organization, so you can click here.

A

You click add device, and then you know it's installing and then once the universal print connected printer finishes being added, then it's ready to use. So if we were to go to a document that a user is trying to print, you can open this print dialog, and here you can see that building 42 floor 3 printer is now visible to that user and that drop-down menu and then they can go through and adjust the different settings that they have and then click print to complete printing the documents.

A

So it's a very simple way to add the printer. You just go to the settings app. You are able to find the printer easily just because the location services that you have on and then you it'll just show up here normally like when you're printing with that universal part yeah, then this is the print queue. That's all for the user part, it's quite simple! The way we designed it just exactly where it was before. I think. That's all brian that I had for today.

B

Okay, excellent- and I think there was um one last question in here- um is: would this be something that fast track, which is a team that microsoft would handle or would be up to us working with our copier company to get off the ground starting to use universal prints?.

A

Yeah fast track is um helping us with it, I'm not sure if they're fully onboarded, yet they should be in the next month or so, but you can reach out to the person who contacts fast track and they'll be able to link you up with them.

B

Excellent and then one other just quick comment as uh where was this 10 years ago, when they wanted to be able to use functionality like this.

B

All right, excellent! Well! Thank you so much michelle for coming on to uh sure about this really appreciate your time and great to see this as an offering look forward to any additional updates you may have in the future feel free to come back and share more about it.

A

Thanks brian.

B