One of the things about Chromebooks that makes them tricky for some to implement in specific environments is printing. You can’t install drivers or printers, and though there are many options for going paperless, you still need paper occasionally.
I asked exprts about this at the Google Summit in NJ last year, and his answer was, “Stop printing things!” which I understand, but it wasn’t the easiest solution to implement in a Pre/K-12 environment
Anyhow, we have a decent enough solution up and running, and I wanted to share it in case it’s also useful for your school. It’s not effortless, but it’s easy to maintain once running.
Table of Contents
Encourage people not to print
Jaime is onto something – there’s often no reason to if you can keep a copy of the article/page/journal you’re reading online. For this purpose, I’d recommend showing everyone how to Print to Google Drive from ChromeOS, which renders a PDF of whatever you’re looking at, fresh off the virtual printer, in your (or your students’) Drive.
Alternatively, I would strongly recommend deploying the Save to Google Drive Chrome extension to all Chrome and Chromebook users in your domain since it allows right-click-to-save-to-Drive functionality to grab images, whole pages, or my favorite, Gmail attachments (right-click, save to Drive, and presto).
Set up a dedicated Cloud Print user.
Create a dummy user (something that can be remembered to you and that would be any thing).
1.Install printers on a server.
Here’s the part where you need hardware. It doesn’t have to be a server, but it should be a computer that is always on, somewhat beefy, and ideally would be a Windows Server 2008 R2 server, but any Windows 7 or even (ulp) Vista or XP box or VM will do.
Make sure that this computer will always be running, will restart and restore services after a reboot, and can see all of the printers you want to give your Chromebooks access to on your network(s) – this is why servers are ideal since they can usually see all networks/VLANs. Find and install the printer drivers (be mindful of 32- vs. 64-bit drivers, etc.) and make sure you can print to all the printers from this server/Windows computer.
2.Install Chrome and the Google Cloud Print Service
Install Chrome, then sign into Chrome as the (As per You account) user you made previously. Now, download and install this software from Google on the Windows machine/server.
Note that if you visit this link on a Mac or Linux, you won’t see the download link – only appears on Windows machines :/ (of course, you can spoof the user agent).
Run through the setup, then sign into Cloud Print in Chrome (the last step of the install process) and have it add your local printers to Cloud Print. You should see all your installed printers (the ones you set up on the server/computer) available in cloud print.
Could you share them?
You could share these all with individual users. However, this puts a burden on your users. What we’ve done is create a Google group (account that you had created) that contains all active users in our domain as members (we add via GAM, but you can use the “All users in domain” object in Google Apps admin too, I believe) in addition to one or two domain admins as owners of the group.
Here’s why: when you share with a group, the owner can accept/add the Cloud Printers on behalf of all group members.
That is, your domain admin or head teacher can add the cloud printer you’ve selected for all students in a class/grade/school/district; they will automatically show up in Chrome and ChromeOS on a Chromebook without you ever having to have the student or user manually add them for themselves.
Share the printers with the group (or groups, see below) you’ve created, have the group owner accept on behalf of the group, and the next time any group member goes to print in Chrome, they’ll be there!
You can get handy with this as well – make one group for everyone and add the printers by the front door, make another group for students with their homeroom on the 9th floor and share only the nearby printers, make another group with only faculty and share the printers in the faculty lounge, etc., etc. Go bonkers.
Conclusion
So that’s it – it’s pretty flexible, reasonably stable now that the Cloud Print Service has been released (very recent and essential), and pretty zippy.
We’re running a single-core Windows 2008 R2 Server VM with around 8GB of memory as our print server, but it’s also doing plenty of other jobs, so it’s not like too much muscle is needed.
Or you can buy the more fancy printers with the Cloud Print service baked in, but then you have to manage them individually.