Registering a color printer with Universal Print

What if you’re finding that when registering a Windows printer to Azure, your Azure users adding the printer can only see Grayscale and Monochrome for the Color Printing Mode selection?

If you are using the same printer for traditional Windows Point and Print, and have set Printer / Properties / Advanced / Printing Defaults to Grayscale, this is intended. The “PaperCut connector for Microsoft Universal Print” service will register only the Grayscale default to Azure.

There are a couple routes to a solution. If you will no longer be connecting Windows clients directly to the print shares using Windows Point and Print, simply set the Printing Defaults to a configuration which supports color. A restart of the “PaperCut connector for Microsoft Universal Print” service is required to push the new configuration up to Azure. The next time the client prints, they should be able to select a color option.

If you have on premise machines still using Windows Point and Print and wish to retain the Printing Defaults set to Grayscale, add a new printer using the same driver specifically for UP with the Printing Defaults set to Color. Windows does not allow duplicate names but they can use the same port and driver. Name the UP specific printer with a name that indicates this use case.

Unregister the first printer from UP then register the UP specific printer. Azure clients will need to connect to the new printer. The UP specific printers do not need to be shared. This way someone cannot accidentally connect to the printer with Windows Point and Print.

In environments with a “Find-Me” printer this is generally an easy task. You will now have another virtual printer. You will need to configure the UP virtual printer to release to the same printers in the Find-Me pool and on each device, configure the device to look for jobs in this new queue.

If you have many printers registered in UP and adding a duplicate queue seems more of a challenge, you can run the “PaperCut connector for Microsoft Universal Print” service with a local or domain service account with local administrative access. Service Account

Log on to the print server with this account, then

• Open Windows Print Management MMC snap-in console

  Windows key + R then type printmanagement.msc and press Enter

• Right-click each printer; select “Properties..”

• Select “Preferences..”. This will be the default for the service account user.

Confirm Color is the default selection. OK.

Printer Properties / Advanced / Printing Defaults is still set to Grayscale. This is the setting copied to Windows clients still using Windows Point and Print. A restart of the “PaperCut connector for Microsoft Universal Print” service is required to push the new configuration up to Azure. The next time the client prints, they should be able to select a color option.

Is there a way to set Printing Defaults to Color for all my printers?

Yes! There’s no need to make this change manually on all of your print queues. Using PowerShell it’s possible to change this setting for all your printers programmatically. If running PowerShell commands on your production print server makes you a bit nervous, then follow our steps here to make a backup of your print server.

Open an elevated PowerShell window on your print server and run the following commands:

$printers = Get-Printer -Name *
foreach ($p in $printers)
{
Set-PrintConfiguration $p.name -Color 1
}

• Hint: -Color 0 will set the Grayscale option for the printers.
• Note: This is the printer setting, not the user Preferences setting.