Our organization is moving away from on-premises infrastructure, so we need to replace our local PaperCut MF deployment. We are considering PaperCut Hive, but since we already have Microsoft 365 E5 licensing, Azure Universal Print is also worth evaluating. The main requirement is Follow-Me printing with badge release: users should be able to send a job to a shared queue and release it at any compatible Toshiba multifunction printer. QR-code release is not an option. Has anyone implemented this with Toshiba devices and Universal Print? Are there important limitations or reasons to avoid Universal Print for this setup?
3 Answers
The key distinction is between releasing a job at one specific printer and true Follow-Me printing. For Follow-Me, users need a shared or virtual queue that holds the jobs until they authenticate at any participating device. Universal Print registering each printer individually does not provide that behavior by itself, so make sure the proposed Toshiba integration explicitly supports a roaming queue and badge authentication.
If Universal Print cannot meet the shared-queue and badge-release requirements, another option is hosting PaperCut MF in a cloud VM, such as an AWS EC2 instance. That would remove the local server while preserving the workflow you already use, though you would still need to plan connectivity, availability, licensing, and device integration.
A similar setup with another multifunction-printer vendor used its device-management platform alongside the Universal Print connector and Microsoft Entra ID. It worked, but the connector and virtual queue still had to run on a server. The printers’ native Universal Print support only registered each device as a separate printer, which was not enough for Follow-Me release. Toshiba may have comparable requirements, so confirm whether its embedded application can authenticate badges and communicate with a shared queue.
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