In a nutshell, the Queues & Drivers section of PaperCut Hive and Pocket enables you to copy and paste print queues between systems.
Printer drivers can be complex pieces of software. The printer driver installer you download from the printer manufacturer’s website often contains much more than what gets installed on the system. It may be a bundle of drivers for many different printers, along with other printer-related utilities. It may even “synthesize” a driver on the fly, depending on the printer you point it to when setting it up.
The printer driver is what controls the options you see when printing. The printing manufacturers know their printers best, and write drivers to display options that correspond to the printers that you purchased. However, as a system administrator looking after printing, it can be tricky to automate the installation of printer drivers to your user devices.
This is where PaperCut Hive and Pocket’s Queues & Drivers functionality comes in. It copies only the parts of the driver that are needed for printing. You still have all the control of choosing the driver and settings, and PaperCut handles replication.
There are two parts to a print queue: the print queue’s configuration and the printer driver. The print queue and printer driver are uploaded and stored by PaperCut in the cloud. At the request of an administrator to test or deploy a queue, they are downloaded to one or more of your users’ devices that are running the edge node software.
The print queue part is private to your organization. It contains your print queue name, default print settings, and other driver-specific settings that relate to your print queue.
The driver part is the “shared” part that is the core of what was downloaded from the manufacturer’s website. This part is shared between all PaperCut Hive and Pocket customers, although it is important to note that it is only possible to download drivers that you have previously set up and copied.
For a more technical and security-focused description of this functionality, see Technical and security details .
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