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Troubleshooting Universal Print

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Microsoft’s Universal Print is a cloud-based service included with Microsoft 365 that helps organizations deploy printers. PaperCut has developed a tool to allow admins to publish print queues to this service, which admins can then deploy to managed PCs. This article goes into some common troubleshooting scenarios with the Microsoft Universal Print connector in PaperCut NG and MF.

For more about setting up Universal Print with PaperCut, check out our Microsoft Universal Print Connector setup guide .

Enabling Universal Print Integration does nothing

In PaperCut NG & MF, under Mobile & BYOD, you may notice the checkbox “Enable Universal Print integration” doesn’t seem to do anything.

The change is subtle, but look at the top of the section Enable Printing. You should see a new Universal Print tab. Click on it to finish configuring your settings.

No Secondary Servers or Site Servers check-in

If your Secondary Servers or Site Servers aren’t checking in, make sure port 9151 is open on the firewall between the main PaperCut server and the secondary servers. The Universal Print Connector relies on this port for communication.

To test the connection, you can use PowerShell. Run the following command on your secondary server to confirm connectivity to the main PaperCut server:

Test-NetConnection -ComputerName <PaperCut_Server_IP> -Port 9151

This will verify if port 9151 is open and accessible between the servers.

Cannot add Universal Printers to workstations

If you’re having trouble adding Universal Printers to workstations, it’s important to note that Microsoft handles client connectivity. Once the client submits the job, we retrieve the resulting PDF from Azure and send it to the queue for printing.

Since this issue relates to the client side, you’ll need to reach out to Microsoft for support.

No finishing options available (hole punch, stapling, tray selection, etc.)

Currently, we only support printing a Microsoft-converted PDF, which doesn’t include the device commands needed for these finishing options. Even if your printer driver is certified for Universal Print and lists advanced finishing options like stapling or tray selection, jobs submitted through our connector won’t be able to display these options to users at print time.

If you’re interested in support for these features, please submit a request through our support portal and reference issue “PIE-25”.

This issue occurs when printers are registered directly with Azure Universal Print instead of using PaperCut’s Universal Print Connector.

Here’s why: when a job is submitted through Azure Universal Print, the job owner is listed as “local SYSTEM” (or whatever account the service is running under). If PaperCut is set to deny printing from unknown users, the job gets canceled instead of being sent to the printer.

You could create a matching user account in PaperCut to allow the job through, but there’s no way to tie the print job to a specific user.

To fix this, we recommend setting up PaperCut’s Universal Print Connector . This way, we can identify the print job’s owner to take advantage of all PaperCut features like reporting, secure print release, account selection, print scripting, and more.

Printing Problems

Users may face issues where print jobs appear as “processing” in the Universal Print queue, but don’t show up in PaperCut or result in any output at the printer. Here are some common scenarios and steps to troubleshoot:

  • Print job not submitted: When a job is uploaded to Universal Print in the Cloud, the PaperCut server should copy the PDF file to the directory [Application-Path]\providers\universal-print\win\data\up\jobs. If the job is appearing in this folder, but isn’t being submitted to the print queue on the server then we’ll need to collect the Universal Print logs in debug mode to identify any failures.
  • Jobs disappear after submission: If print jobs are submitted to the queue but then vanish, it can be caused by On demand user creation settings. This can happen when the owner string in the printer queue doesn’t match any entry in the PaperCut user list. Check Options > User/Group Sync > On Demand User Creation and see what PaperCut is configured to do when the user does not exist.
  • New users created: When PDFs are copied from Azure, if a new user is created in PaperCut, ensure that their username matches the owner string for the job. For more details on troubleshooting user synchronization, visit our guide on User and Group Sync with Entra ID .
  • Intermittent printing issues: If printing works for a while and then suddenly stops, try restarting the PaperCut Connector for Microsoft Universal Print service. You can do this by opening services.msc on the PaperCut/Print Server.

If problems persist, follow the steps to enable debug mode for Universal Print . Then after reproducing the issue, collect the logs to share with your PaperCut support contact.

 

 

 

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