SkyByte Consulting knows the benefits of using Citrix XenApp, and one of those benefits our clients cant live without is the ability to print to a locally attached printer such as a home or personal printer. Citrix admins know printing can make or break Citrix, so installing printer drivers should always be performed with caution. The majority of our clients with a Citrix Xenapp installation, use Citrix to access their company resources securely and enjoy the ability to print to their home or personal printers. When printers are mapped during logon, any client created printer will attempt to match your local print driver with the same driver if its available on the Citrix server. If a matching driver is not available, it will default to use the Citrix Universal Driver. The Citrix Universal Driver has been refined with every new release, and is almost compatible with virtually any printer. But occasionally there are times when the Citrix Universal Driver performance just cannot match the native print driver. Whenever possible I recommend using native print drivers to minimize print problems.
Printer manufacturers offer downloadable drivers on their website. When installing a print driver to a Citrix XenApp server, you only need the basic print driver. Keep in mind, most home printers come with alot of extras that are not needed on the Citrix server. To make things more difficult, the entire software package is only available. Extracting the driver can be difficult but can be performed.
Recently I was asked to install a driver for an HP Officejet 8600. HP offers the full software, but also the basic print driver on their website. I downloaded the basic driver which was a single .exe self extracting file. After the automatic extraction was complete, a setup wizard began and immediately told me my OS (Windows Server 2008 R2) was not supported. This was very disappointing, but I found a work around to getting the driver installed. The self extraction extracted all of the files including the driver into the C:\users\username\appdata\local\temp directory. Simply pointing the add printer driver wizard to that directory made installing the driver extremely easy.
If you find no choice but to install the full feature driver there are ways to getting just the basic driver installed. If you are installing from a disk, there may be a folder containing the drivers. Also check out my other blog explaining how to remotely install print drivers from another machine here.
Printer manufacturers offer downloadable drivers on their website. When installing a print driver to a Citrix XenApp server, you only need the basic print driver. Keep in mind, most home printers come with alot of extras that are not needed on the Citrix server. To make things more difficult, the entire software package is only available. Extracting the driver can be difficult but can be performed.
Recently I was asked to install a driver for an HP Officejet 8600. HP offers the full software, but also the basic print driver on their website. I downloaded the basic driver which was a single .exe self extracting file. After the automatic extraction was complete, a setup wizard began and immediately told me my OS (Windows Server 2008 R2) was not supported. This was very disappointing, but I found a work around to getting the driver installed. The self extraction extracted all of the files including the driver into the C:\users\username\appdata\local\temp directory. Simply pointing the add printer driver wizard to that directory made installing the driver extremely easy.
If you find no choice but to install the full feature driver there are ways to getting just the basic driver installed. If you are installing from a disk, there may be a folder containing the drivers. Also check out my other blog explaining how to remotely install print drivers from another machine here.
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