Mobile Wirless Printing in the Office

[ame540]

This question as bothered me for quite some time.

How can i setup a wireless LAN in our office so that visiting sales reps can easily connect to a wireless LAN and print from a share / public printer.

Now heres the BIG question...

How can i make it so that they can connect and not have to go through a painstaking process of installing printer drivers. Is there some sort of utility out there that exists that will load the driver for them so they can print easily? maybe a universal driver thats easy to load?

I preconfigured our tradeshow booth this year to print wirelessly, but it invloved walking through each user setting up and loading the print drivers first, etc. It was a real hassle.

Anyway, i dont know if anything like this even exists, but thought i would throw the question out there, because it would be really nice if a sales rep from out of town could boot up his wireless laptop, connect to the wireles network and be able to print hassle free, w/o any involvement from the IT staff (ie, ME).

Thank you!

-Aaron

 

[MaxPipeline]

This may depend on the printer, but for HP printers Windows should already have drivers available. You would simply have the printer available to share. Then you would map from your user PC to the printer. It should automatically load drivers. At least it does for me with my home setup. Difference for me is my print server is my desktop PC which is usually on and the printer I have is an HP officejet all-in-one that is connected to my PC via USB.

Example:
\\192.168.1.100\hpoffice
where 192.168.1.100 is the IP of my desktop and hpoffice is the sharename for the printer.