Today at the first day of Ignite, Microsoft has finally announced that Universal Print is finally available for everyone.
Universal Print is the premier cloud print service available at scale to businesses and educational organizations, deployed in the cloud on Microsoft’s datacenters and available to customers who have one of the following Windows or Microsoft 365 subscriptions:
- Microsoft 365 Business Premium
- Windows 10 Enterprise E3, E5
- Microsoft 365 Enterprise F3, E3, E5
- Windows 10 Education A3, A5
- Microsoft 365 Education A3, A5
NOTE: For customers without a subscription that includes Universal Print, the service can be licensed standalone. The standalone subscription does not come with, but requires, Azure Active Directory.
Universal Print is for customers who are moving to the cloud and need the ability to print using a cloud service, as Azure Active Directory joined devices are unable to discover printers on local print servers.
You can click here for more detail on how to get started.
What about Universal Print support on Dynamics 365 Business Central? With 2021 release wave 1 (available in April), Dynamics 365 Business Central will support printing via Universal Print so customers can send documents and reports to any of the printers registered with Universal Print. No more need to use on-premise print servers or using third-party cloud printer services.
Technical details are available in the Universal Print documentation
These are the great news. But there also the bad news 🙂
Universal Print comes with a pool of print jobs that are available to all users who have a license. Each Universal Print license includes 5 print jobs per month which are pooled. For example, a subscription with 100 licensed users will have 500 jobs per month available to all users. Unused print jobs expire at the end of each month.
A single printed document is counted as a single print job, regardless of the number of pages or number of copies printed. Attributes such as single vs. double sided or color vs. grayscale do not affect print job count. A print job is only counted when it is successfully completed.
If your print usage will exceed the included capacity, additional print job volume is available to be added to your organization’s pool. Customers can add additional volume add-on packs (500 print jobs each per month) to their standard pool of print jobs. Volume add-on packs are available through your regular channel and you can acquire multiple add-ons packs to increase your printing capacity.
You can view your total print volume, monitor usage, and know when you need to purchase additional volume via the Usage and Reports page in the Universal Print portal:
If you’ve a printer not yet listed as supported for Universal Print, please also remember that a connector for printers is available (it’s a small Windows service that runs on any Windows PC and that can connects your local printers to the cloud).
So… now we can easily print from the cloud, but this comes with a price to pay…
Stefano Demiliani 