Posted by: Brian R. Kneebone
Technology Consultant, Imaging and Printing Group  

In the category of "updates I would like to have posted earlier", I want to let everyone know that the HP Universal Print Drivers have been updated.  Although if you are getting proactive alerts, you would have already known this.  This UPD update includes all versions (PCL5, PCL6 and Postscript) as well as all operating system bit depths (32-bit/x86 and 64-bit/x64).

	Previous Versions	Current Versions
Release Dates	April 2008	November 2008
Universal Print Drivers x86/x64: PCL5, PCL6, PostScript	4.5	4.7
HP Managed Print Administration Windows IIS Based Application	2.5.0	2.5.2
HP Active Directory Templates ADM Template for MS GPOs	3.0	4.0

 

For those not familiar with the HP Universal Print Driver, it is compatible with over 100 devices made by Hewlett-Packard (generally anything that supports PCL5, PCL6 or Postscript made by HP - check your product specifications).  It can be used in the following major ways:

• As a standard print driver shared from a Windows print server using Microsoft Point-and-Print
• As a standard print driver used directly on clients printing to network devices
• As a standard print driver used directly on clients printing to USB plug-and-play devices
• As a single driver pointing to multiple network devices with a dynamic discovery window using optional printer lists created in the MPA tool and made available via MPA or ADM.

This of course is an over simplification.  I recommend reviewing the "Evaluators Guide" and/or "Product Introduction Video" found on the HP Universal Print Driver website.

Before you deploy the driver into your large production print servers, I recommend observing the following points of advice:

1. This driver employs the same shared Microsoft UniDrive (unidrv.dll and related files for PCL5 and PCL6) and Pscript (pscript5.dll and related files for Postscript) technology as many other drivers depend upon, including those drivers supplied from other (non-HP) print vendors.  While the use of UniDrive and Pscript is a very positive thing for multilingual support and various other reasons, I recommend a measure of caution.
• Where possible, HP is advising customers proactively in its release notes to look for behaviours where shared components are updated including the length of time required to update servers with large ammounts of print queues and possible cases where driver defaults change settings upon updates.  Much of this is expected behavior based on how the various components interact with one another, so please review the release notes which accompany the product download for more information on these topics.
• It is worth mentioning there are some relatively new hot-fixes available for MS UniDrive and possibly MS Pscript available from Microsoft's support website which may be pertinent to your environment.
2. Review the accompanying release notes as well as the "Documents" section of the main HP Universal Print Driver portal if you manage clustered print servers and/or Windows Terminal Server (WTS) and/or Citrix Presentation/XenApp servers for additional sources of information.
3. As a general recommendation, I do advise my enteprise customers to test any driver from any vendor before deployment in their production environment.  One approach may be to simply do a P2V (Physical-to-Virtual) or V2V (if your production server is virtualized already) copy of a production server and perform the update offline for simulation purposes once cloned.  Some really great P2V and V2V tools are available from HP (Proliant Essentials), Microsoft and VMware.  While this extra step may not be required for a few smaller servers, I like recommending this approach for large centralized servers hosting hundreds of print queues.  Be mindful of your licensing arrangements of course.

Okay, so now that the bases have been generally covered, let's get into the really great features that were added with the HP Universal Print Driver 4.7 above and beyond what was available with version 4.5. 

Some of the new features of UPD version 4.7 include:

• The ability to pre-configure driver settings like number of trays, duplex, color, etc. without needing to depend exclusively on the dynamic discovery capabilities which have made the Universal Print Driver famous.  This will allow network administrators to deploy print queues in advance of having hardware physically available to discover at the other end of the network as well as be more functional with solutions like HP Access Control Secure Printing.
• The ability to allow users interacting with the dynamic discovery window to create permanent instances of printers they use regularly, even if they do not have local administrative rights.  On previous versions this was restricted to local administrators and power users.  The ability to suppress permanent printer creation remains available as a configurable setting in MPA/ADM if required.
• The ability to define and use separator pages within the print driver.  Previously with HP devices, users had to obey settings administrators defined using Microsoft separator pages which were global to that particular print queue.  While this is still possible, HP has added a feature in-driver which is configurable user-by-user (if administrators enable this in the "Device Settings" tab on that particular print queue) as an alternative to the Microsoft separator pages.
• The ability for Web Jetadmin to interrogate more locally connected devices over USB when using the HP Web Jetadmin SNMP Proxy Agent available from the HP Web Jetadmin portal.  Previously, devices could only be interrogated if using the DOT4 (1284.4) printer port.  This new set of language libraries allows for interrogation of a broader range of devices including Composite USB.  For those who don't know this, the proxy agent will also interrogate some of HP's new emerging scanner products including the HP ScanJet N9120.
• The ability to select a new short cut called "Eco-print" where duplex printing is enabled when selected.  While printing in duplex is by no means a new feature, HP is doing its part to elevate the visibility on reducing land waste and carbon considerations through more avenues.  For those who don't know, back with the introduction of the Universal Print Driver 4.5 configurable switches for install.exe and/or MPA/ADM engines allow administrators to define default duplex policies.  This has been continued with this and future versions of the HP Universal Print Driver.
• The ability to use more advanced version controls.  When adding the driver using the Microsoft Add Printer Wizard (APW) or Add Driver Wizard (ADW), administrators are given an option to install the universal print driver over-top existing versions or allow it to largely co-exist with previous versions.  I say "largely" because some shared components from Microsoft (notably UniDrive and Pscript) get updated regardless.  But many of the HP dependencies are given unique names and the ability for multiple driver INF versions to co-exist on the same server has been received quite well by the administrator communities who desire more flexible control in their environments.
• The ability to enable early warm-up.  This is a powerful feature for devices which have deeper sleeps where even before the job is fully rendered, a wake-up command can be relayed to the printer to reduce wait times.  While most of HP's devices have pioneered the use of "Instant-On" technologies, this is particularly helpful for jobs going to large departmental devices which support this command using modern firmware.
• The ability to print to non-HP devices is now supported when using the commands detailed in the release notes of the product.  Remember however, that many of the features may not be available or compatible with non-HP devices, but where you just want to do a simple print to a competitive product on the run, this could be quite helpful (e.g. where using the driver as a mobile driver in an environment other than your own).
• The ability to deploy more devices used in a plug-and-play (USB-connected) environment.
• The ability to support pin-less private print jobs by way of management tools like the MPA and ADM templates.

This is a fantastic product that's worked extremely well for most of our enterprise and smaller customers alike.  As with any driver, follow prudent testing before deploying into production to ensure the results you see are expected.  Contact your support resource if you have any product specific issues.  If you'd like to request special consultation with an on site specialist, work with your HP sales representative who will prepare a quotation for you based on your organization's requirements.

Take care, Brian ...

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Posted 01-26-2009 11:30 PM by Brian R. Kneebone