Administrating, maintaining, and ensuring connectivity to printers have always been challenging subjects in IT.
With Microsoft 365 Universal Print, Microsoft stepped into the cloud-Print game, with a product that enabled an intuitive and feature-rich service, which a the same time reduces time and effort from the IT Department.
Some of the bullet-points describing the service:
- Enabling prints from zero-trust networks, using Single Sign-On (SSO) with Azure AD.
- Integration with Microsoft Endpoint Manager using the Universal Print printer provisioning tool
- Rich management capabilities by Web portal, API, and Powershell.
- Eliminates the need for printer drivers on client machines.
- Print data is stored in the same manner as other Microsoft 365 data, ensuring it’s secure and compliant.
- A long list of printer partners is already enabling Universal Print capabilities directly into their printer products, allowing the printers to communicate directly with Azure
With excitement, I have been following Microsoft 365 Universal Print since back in the summer of 2020, where the public preview was announced. As soon as the GA release, I started working with the service, both as a user, but also an implementer. Generally, it was a great experience, and it worked as intended. But then it came to the licensing model, it all fell apart
Licensing
Though Universal Print is included in multiple Microsoft 365 subscriptions (License Universal Print), there is a usage cost as well.
Subscription
- Microsoft 365 Enterprise F3, E3, E5, A3, A5
- Windows 10 Enterprise E3, E5, A3, A5
- Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Each active license of the above subscriptions includes 5 monthly print jobs. In short, this means that a company with 10 active Microsoft 365 Business Premium licenses, can do 50 print jobs each month, without additional cost.
(10 licenses * 5 jobs per user per month) = 50 jobs per month
If the monthly print jobs exceed the included amount, additional jobs can be added by purchasing a volume add-on pack (500 print jobs per pack) is $25 per tenant per month.)
This licensing model makes it costly for a small company to even get started, as the included amount is only 5 print jobs per active license.
To make Microsoft 365 Universal Print attractive for small companies, there should be included a number of print jobs in each Microsoft 365 tenant. This could be done as simple as, adding the first volume add-on pack for free.
For medium and large companies, the average number of jobs printed by each user, might be lower than the included 5 jobs or close enough, so the cost is kept low, because of the large number of active licenses.
The following example is from the (License Universal Print) article, and it makes better sense than for small businesses.
(1,000 licenses * 5 jobs per user per month) + (10 Add-ons * 500 jobs per month) = 10,000 jobs per month
Luckily, the licensing model might be subject to change in the future, as stated in the (License Universal Print) article.
We will closely watch demand patterns to inform our future decisions on add-on packs for different volumes.
I will keep following Microsoft 365 Universal Print and where Microsoft will take it, and hope for changes to the licensing model, as it would make it easier and a no-brainer to implement this to small companies, as well as for medium and large.