Have you ever been asked to define new printing defaults for end users? I've put together a video tutorial targeted for new printing administrators. And for that matter existing print administrators who have only recently looked at applying settings by default.

Speaking personally, I know that I had to discover some of this (earlier in my career) by trial-and-error and got some bruises along the way. My hope here is that I can share out what I've learned and let administrators make their own decisions about how best to proceed in their organization.

Rather than go into a full on discussion here in email, take a peek at the video tutorial below:

In summary, printing defaults can be defined at the hardware level or the driver level. Drivers trump hardware settings (except when using advanced Color Access Controls for select colour devices which we'll explore in some future post). Also, printing defaults (when properly defined in "Advanced" -> "Printing Defaults..." are used by clients who point-and-print-connect the first time or have existing connections where the end-user has not saved any permanent defaults themselves in their Printers folder.

Next we'll take a look at driver deployment and preconfiguration utilities HP like HP Web Jetadmin as well as tools like the Microsoft Print Management Console in a future series.