Manage Existing Printers

The Admin Console provides a setting enabling Virtual Appliance to start managing printers already installed on end user workstations. The value of this setting is that you do not have to uninstall and reinstall printers on workstations for Virtual Appliance to recognize and manage those printers. The following steps describe the process for configuring Virtual Appliance to start managing previously installed printers on the workstations.

TCP / IP Printer Settings

Here is a brief overview of the settings used to manage existing printers. To access the Client settings go to Tools Settings Client.

Automatically manage all end-user TCP / IP printers

Enable this option to use Virtual Appliance to manage previously installed printers on a workstation that match up with a printers in the Admin Console.

Enable auto-management item level targeting

Item level targeting allows you to designate specific users, groups, IP ranges, etc., impacted by the setting above. Click Show Filter to define targets. If you are rolling out Virtual Appliance to a new environment, item-level targeting lets you do so in segments rather than all at once.

Additional Settings

Control end user interactions with TCP / IP printers and printer ports.

Allow non-administrators to modify/delete TCP / IP printers

Enable this option to allow end users to alter the settings or delete TCP / IP printers managed by Virtual Appliance.

Allow end-users to capture printer ports for legacy applications

Enable this option to add an icon to the system tray menu so end users can capture printer ports (such as LPT1) and direct the output to a TCP / IP printer.

Item Level Targeting

You can restrict the auto-management functionality to a specific set of devices, sites, or users. A use case for this would be if you were doing a staged roll-out of Virtual Appliance. Rolling the Virtual Appliance Client out to one site, running tests, rolling the Client out to a second site, running more tests, and then pushing the Client to the rest of the organization. The following steps describe the process for restricting the Client from managing existing printers to specific devices, sites, or users.