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Originally Posted by slimslob
It is more likely that Ricoh and any other print vendor has to pay a licensing and development fee to Microsoft to get a MS Universal Print certification.
Ricoh and many other print vendors have lost a lot of money over the last six months due to COVID-19.
MS Universal Print is a very new product with very low market penetration so Ricoh and other print vendors are likely interested spectators at this time.
Not a good idea to be wiping all of the legacy stuff away. With so many schools and universities running virtual classes using zoom and other conference services creating extreme band width demand internet providers and internet services such as Microsoft 365 cloud are often not available. I personally know individuals who have had problems within the last 7 days.
Oct 01 2020- Microsoft Suffered Worldwide Outlook Outage Today—Here’s What We Know
On Monday, September 28, Microsoft users suffered a massive outage impacting Teams, Office 365 and Outlook. Now, just 48 hours after you thought everything was back to normal, Microsoft Outlook has gone down again.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2020/10/01/new-worldwide-microsoft-outage-confirmed-heres-what-we-know/#19236bb3d370
"For now, all I can say is if this isn't caused by malicious activity, then less than competent activity has to be next on the likely suspect list.
Two massive outages in the space of four days, it should go without saying, but I will anyway, simply isn't good enough, Microsoft. Nor, for that matter, is the lack of transparency as to the cause of such disruptions."
... maybe the Microsoft Cloud is not as reliable as once thought?
'The customer is always right' though haha
This is similar to months ago when Sharepoint and everything went down because useage went up 400% over a few days because of everyone working from home, they did sort that out pretty quick, but in this instance legacy stuff will still be there for months or even up to a year. Maybe that is why he said such a long timescale because he knows it isn't fully reliable yet.
And the internet is ... a cloud
If a printer is installed correctly on the customers network, any host (guest or employee with correct log in) on that network can easily - and fast - download the printer (add printer) to print.
In fact every network is a cloud (separated by routers). If the customer wants to connect to a specific cloud (outside his own network), he will use the internet to make the path to that router of the cloud.
So, i still do not understand the advantage of a universal printer.
In that scenario though if they were to go on holiday to another country then decided to just do a bit of work and print it out on any printer at any of their sites in their own country, just by logging into their 365 account, no vpn or anything, just a simple connection to wifi at their hotel. How would you go about setting that up for them?
I don't really get a say in it, this IT guy wants what he wants and if it is doable we are happy to try it and sell them some machines.
Incidentally we spoke to him this morning, told them that Ricoh have outright said to us that this is going live in December and Ricoh will also be releasing stuff to be compatible at the same time, so after probably numerous firmware updates and bugs being sorted it should be a working function in February.
On the plus side if people want to start doing this it makes my installations go quicker because all I can do is roll it in, setup IP address etc, setup scanning and the rest is up to their IT (in an ideal world)
IT'ers are a strange specie. They have the quality to make themselves indispensable. Isn't it?
Not always. I have known good ones such as the one at Taft City Schools who would provide me with the IP address, mask, domain name, DNS servers and internet gateway to use for new installs. My boss would provide him with the driver disk and he would take care everything else.
I have known bad ones such as the one that was at the Bakersfield office of PCL. I got called out once when the warehouse supervisor was unable to print. I found the problem in a matter of minutes. I contacted the receptionist to have her get a hold of the IT for me so I could tell him what problem I had found. He told her he was too busy replacing gateway between the various buildings to talk to anyone. At that time he had been working on the network for over 4 hours. Since the receptionist had my mobile number about 5 minutes I got a call from the west coast IT supervisor who wanted to know what I had found. I told him that I found the DNS went down sometime during the night. Everything that had fixed IP addresses such as the printers and servers could talk to each other as could any computer that had been left on all night. Everyone who had to turn their computers on in the morning had no access to printers, servers and the internet.
Did you guys ever get this working for the RICOH copiers? I'm in the same boat, I have an install tomorrow with this requirement in order for the deal to stick.
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