How to install Mobility Print queues onto managed iOS/iPadOS devices using Microsoft Intune

Although Mobility Print is primarily a BYOD print enablement tool, you may want to use it to allow your managed iOS and iPadOS devices to print to queues hosted on your print server. There are three main ways to enable on-network printer discovery for these devices types; using mDNS, DNS, or a Known Host . However, if the devices are managed with Microsoft Intune the discovery process can be streamlined by creating an AirPrint profile in Intune itself, which is then deployed to your clients. This means your end-users won’t have to follow any steps in order to discover your printers.

Microsoft has written documentation on how AirPrint configurations can be pushed out with Intune - this process requires you to know four pieces of information for each printer object:

1. The server address
2. The resource path
3. The port
4. Whether TLS is enabled

These four pieces of information are used to construct a connection string to the printer on the iOS/iPadOS device.

If I have a printer called myPrinter, and my server address is myServerFQDN, the four pieces of information would be as follows:

1. The server address is myServerFQDN
2. The resource path is /printers/myPrinter
3. The port is always 9164
4. TLS is always enabled/forced

If you’re unsure of the exact form your printer name will be in, one way to confirm is to temporarily switch your Mobility Print server into Known Host discovery mode (if it is not already), and access the iOS setup page from the Mobility Print admin interface on a desktop machine:

You can then click the Download button to produce an iOS/iPadOS profile (the filename will be Mobility Print iOS Profile.mobileconfig):

This file can be opened in a text editor with UTF-8 encoding - it uses XML for the basic structure, and you should be able to easily see the resource path for each published printer.

In the example below, you can see it is /printers/My%20Printer because the printer name contained a space, though generally speaking you should aim to only ever use alphanumeric characters in printer names and printer share names, as the presence of spaces and other special characters can cause a number of issues:

<dict>
	<key>IPAddress</key>
	<string>myServerFQDN</string>
	<key>ResourcePath</key>
	<string>/printers/My%20Printer</string>
	<key>Port</key><integer>9164</integer>
	<key>ForceTLS</key><true></true>
</dict>

Your Mobility Print server does not need to remain in Known Host discovery mode for printers setup this way to work, so if you were using mDNS or DNS previously, you can switch it back once you’ve obtained the .mobileconfig file.

You might be wondering why we can’t upload this .mobileconfig file directly to Intune as-is - while it is possible to do this, you may encounter compatibility issues concerning the exact structure of the XML file we generate, and what Intune expects. For that reason, it’s typically much simpler to define the printer manually as above.