Following a break from routine yesterday (I went to Sheffield to attend TEDx, where I learnt that I should listen to the Beatles, build cool things with Arduino, use my right brain more, disrupt things, adopt a workflow with no incentives and finally think inside and outside the box at the same time) I am back today and looking at the final pieces of the remote printing puzzle before I get back to revolutionising the way we deal with support queries.
It turns out that Windows Server since 2000 has included IIS components for doing IP Printing (IPP for short) as standard, and all you need to do is share a printer and tick a box. Even better, it comes with support for Windows Integrated Login (the amazingly annoying one which means you need to put “NETWORK\” before your username) and HTTP authentication for those of us who enjoy the *NIX approach to life (Mac guys, that includes you as well). The icing on the cake is that this authentication information is still passed all the way to the spooler in the same way as when you print locally or over the domain (as Lincoln’s printing works at the moment).
So in summary: we already have a fully featured, standards compliant (although admittedly I still need to work out exactly which ports need punching on the firewall for it to work without the HTTP transport) printing solution for non-domain machines of all OS flavours which supports authentication against our existing Active Directory with no additional hardware, software or expenditure and only a short afternoon’s work to implement it
I’ll let you know when we’re ready to let you play around.