Feature Request Fog Client - Printers
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Hi, Guys.
Just some thoughts here. It Would be great if the Windows FOG Client could deploy printers based on AD security groups.
That way you could have the entire management of printers/deployment managed from the web interface.
I’ve seen a few other printer management software do something similar.Cheers,
Adam -
@ripau said in Feature Request Fog Client - Printers:
That way you could have the entire management of printers/deployment managed from the web interface.
FOG already can manage the entire process of deploying printers. You can have as many groups in FOG as you like (just like AD) and one host can be a member of as many groups as you like (just like AD).
At one of my past jobs, I had a group for:
- Every network printer
- Every make
- Every model
- Every room
- Every lab
- Every hall
- All Desktops
- All laptops
- All (just everything in this one)
I used printer groups only for deploying and managing printers.
I used Model groups for deploying images.
I used room/lab groups for deploying software via snapins
I used Laptop groups for all the same things but was extra conscious of their low-bandwidth because of the buildings overburdened wifi system.
I used “All” for updating Chrome and other small things - or to turn off everything at 9 PM with power management.This is just a small list - the possibilities are endless. All this is already possible with FOG Groups, so you see how little ‘Value’ a new feature would provide if FOG can already do the same things as it is.
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sorry, I wasn’t suggesting I wasn’t able to already do this. I am already managing fog printers in this fashion via groups created in fog, but I already allocate users into groups within AD based on location etc. So I am kind of doing this twice.
I was more thinking that if you have users already allocated in security groups already it would be handy to have a feature on a printer that the fog client automatically sees you as a member of “Admin” or “Finance” and allocates the correct printers without having to do this in two locations (AD and fog), as soon as the printers are configured and ready to go the fog client then knows who this gets deployed to via AD groups.
Anyway it was just a thought and figured I would throw this out there and I only mention it because products like Printer Logic can do this (obviously aimed at a different type of management)
Cheers!
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@ripau It is an interesting idea but I do think it would be a lot of effort to impliment. I think this sort of thing would be great as a plugin in FOG. Plugins can create & use extra tables and hook into all of the FOG Server’s existing functionalities but using the new code that comes with the plugins.
You could probably change the assigned printers dynamically based on who the FOG Client says is signed in. The plugin would have to take who’s signed in and make an LDAP query to the AD server to see what groups that user is in, then figure out somehow what printers that user gets.
One problem though - the fog client is not so hot at removing printers. I and many other people have had a lot of problems with it. In a best-case scenario, a computer gets imaged and when it boots up, the fog client installs printers that never need uninstalled. Eventually, the next imaging in the future wipes all that out and then installs the correct printers, rinse, repeat.
