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Printer Management with RDP / Terminal Servers

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Last Post by cmahon 8 years ago

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Sam

(@sam)

Posts: 371

Honorable Member

Topic starter

Polling the collective mind of CHUG to see how you manage printers in your RDP / Terminal Server environment. I have received GE's "official word" on how we should be managing them, but want to see how real-life customers are doing it.

We have multiple office locations and multiple terminal servers that users "rotate" throughout.

Thanks

Posted : October 29, 2013 4:02 am

Mitch Kwiatkowski

(@mitch)

Posts: 111

Estimable Member

We have eight terminal servers and 18 locations. Printers are pushed out through an AD group policy based on OU membership of the user's account.

Posted : October 29, 2013 10:45 pm

Kevin

(@kparkermilreg-org)

Posts: 7

Active Member

Mitch, Do you use a print server for all of your printers or are the printers installed locally on the client workstation?

Kevin

Posted : October 29, 2013 11:12 pm

Sam

(@sam)

Posts: 371

Honorable Member

Topic starter

Mitch,

Would you be willing to share how you set this up? Perhaps over the phone or a webex?

If so, contact me at [email protected]

Thanks!

Posted : October 29, 2013 11:18 pm

Mitch Kwiatkowski

(@mitch)

Posts: 111

Estimable Member

We use a print server service on a NAS device (running Windows Server). I don't have all of the details on how it was set up, but I can ask our IT Director to provide more information if he has some time.

Posted : October 30, 2013 5:03 am

Sam

(@sam)

Posts: 371

Honorable Member

Topic starter

That would be great. GE is telling me we should be on Task-Based printing, but that means resetting printers each time a user travels to a new location. Thanks!

Posted : October 30, 2013 5:56 am

Kevin

(@kparkermilreg-org)

Posts: 7

Active Member

we do use task based printing, and yes they need to reset when they go to different sites. I would love to find a solution that allows users to go to multiple sites and only see the printers at that site. Printing in GE using Citrix/TS gets very complex.

Posted : October 30, 2013 6:04 am

Sam

(@sam)

Posts: 371

Honorable Member

Topic starter

"Complex" is a nicer way to put it than I would describe at this point. Cool

What versions of Centricity are you two running? We're some "old hold-outs" on CPS 9.5 right now...

Posted : October 30, 2013 6:14 am

Mitch Kwiatkowski

(@mitch)

Posts: 111

Estimable Member

We do not use task-based printing because it has never worked for us in our Terminal Services / Remote Desktop environment. Whenever a user changed a printer, it changed for everyone on the same server. It would be useful if it worked, but we do well without it. We are on CPS 11.

Posted : October 30, 2013 9:16 pm

Sam

(@sam)

Posts: 371

Honorable Member

Topic starter

Mitch,

That's the issue we're currently having (one users' changes affecting others) and GE tells me that task-based printing would fix the problem... though they do not seem to recognize the problem with telling staff and providers to change their printers every time they enter a building. Seems that GE is offering conflicting advise on this and doesn't feel the need to fix since you're on the latest product release and still having to workaround their bad programming.

With your current Print Server setup, are you having any printer problems or glitches? Any information you or your IT group could provide on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Posted : October 30, 2013 10:05 pm

joshua.tilson

(@joshua-tilson)

Posts: 130

Estimable Member

We used Task Based printing as they call it. And it is indeed a pain.

we have 4 terminal services servers and 8 offices. this means that different offices share terminal servers, this means that, yes, when a provider or other employee travels to another site you have to reset the Windows Default printer and then you have to reset your printers inside centricity.

I am unsure of any other way to do this, but we would love to find something more automatic. We have tried deploying printers based on GPO, however in our environment it gets very complicated to do so correctly. So we end up manually adding printers for users and resetting every time the travel to a new location.

Mitch I would also love to hear some more form Your IT guys on how and what they do in regards to printers in CPS.

Oh we are on version 11, and it is exactly the same as it was in version 9.5 (not sure about 10 we skipped that one.)

Posted : October 30, 2013 10:13 pm

Kevin

(@kparkermilreg-org)

Posts: 7

Active Member

Do you use a print server, or are the printers installed on each terminal server? Also, do you use roaming profiles?

Kevin

Posted : October 30, 2013 10:16 pm

glamontagne

(@glamontagne)

Posts: 89

Estimable Member

We do things a bit differently than the rest of you. We have a dedicated terminal server for each office. This allows people who roam between offices to not need their printer settings swapped. We found that installing the printers locally on the terminal servers fixed many printing related issues we were running into. Printing is much, much quicker now. By installing locally, all users on a particular terminal server have all the printers at their particular location. We set their default printer manually to the printer they sit by most often. If they swap seats, they either choose a different printer in Centricity, or they call us to change it for them.

Posted : October 30, 2013 10:48 pm

Sam

(@sam)

Posts: 371

Honorable Member

Topic starter

Gary,

We are set up exactly like you are. We have a terminal server for each location. At our main office, we have providers, clinical staff, and audiologists each on their own terminal servers. We're having seemingly random periods where printers on the doctor server will change/de-select themselves. GE told us it was because someone else changed them who was on the same server, but I know that none of our providers are changing their printer settings to send all items to our Rx Printer.

Have you experienced this?

Posted : October 30, 2013 11:49 pm

kwolfe

(@kwolfe)

Posts: 63

Trusted Member

Some of you know this, but I'd just like to summarize some of the task based printer issues… there is a setting in emr.ini that changes how the task based printers are saved on terminal servers. If UseClientName=FALSE, CPS will associate the printers to the server name and rdp session number. The session numbers are recycled after logging off, so it's likely for someone else to have the wrong printer settings restored when they log on. I'm not sure why this would be useful.

On terminal servers it's better to use UseClientName=TRUE so CPS will use the name of the pc connected to the server. This results in more predicable behavior and the settings are attached to the client's machine name as if it were a fat client. Local or mapped network printers installed on the server should be fine. However, if you're using printer redirection you can have a problem if "(redirected #)" is in the names since those session ids will change. I imagine other applications have this issue… maybe it's possible to deal with that with something that renames the printer to something else unique to the user, or a script to update the database PRINTERS table.

Then for users who move their device between locations will have the same task based printers set. glamontagne's method of having a server for each location sounds nice because it avoids the issue. It's possible to set Windows default printers with a logon script based on network IP or other attributes, but that doesn't help CPS. The only automated method I've thought of would be something that directly updates the database.

Posted : October 31, 2013 2:49 am

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