I installed this recently for a client, and was pleasantly surprised to see how well it worked – and how easy it was to set up!
The latest upgrade to Collobos Fingerprint wireless printing software has a visual upgrade, as well as some really cool advanced features for printing in an Active Directory environment. They’ve also moved from a one-time purchase and making it an annual subscription of $20 / year for the SOHO version, and $340 / year for the Enterprise version. The Enterprise version includes the Security /Active Directory support, cross subnet printing, as well as premium support from Collobos.
This license is based off the number of servers you install it on, so if you have one server hosting and sharing a bunch of printers, you’ll only need to install and license it once.
All that said, if you have a wireless network, and users who would like to be able to print from their mobile devices, this great little utility can be your new best friend!
Download the installer from their site and install it – no real options were required, just next, next next. When the program starts up, it will detect the printers you have installed and automatically start sharing them – unless you have any advanced requirements, this is all you’ll need to do.
The advanced options have to deal with specifying different domains or network proxies – neither of which were things I needed to make any changes to.
This little print server now begins to broadcast your shared printers via Bonjour, Apple’s sharing technology. It’s also compatible with Google Cloud Print, so you should be able to set up Android devices with it, as well as remote printing through your Google account – I haven’t tried that part, so your mileage may vary!
Here’s how you print from your iDevice:
From a document, webpage or email, tap on the arrow icon:
Tap Print:
Tap Select Printer:
Pick whichever printer you’d like to print to – you’ll notice that it detects all available printers on this server and makes them available to me (and yes, this screenshot is from a different system than the first screenshot)
Select your options, and tap Print:
And off it goes!
Presto installs on any version of Windows from XP to Windows 8, and Server 2003 – Server 2012. Presto also allows you to create virtual printers for printing to PDF, Dropbox or OneNote. Advanced documentation is available from their website.
Master & CmdR 