It seems like every couple of years I come upon this. Hoping someone might have some input.
I handle almost all of the network installation and trouble calls for our company. When it comes to user codes and printing, it seems like there are many things to consider.
To resolve this, I normally explain to the customer that for most of our customers we set the printing to default to B&W and they choose color as needed. If they want user codes for printing we can set them up, but there are some challenges.
Some of these problems are the following:
Let's say for example that it is a real estate office. To simplify installing printing on new agents computers, I usually set up a print server (or shared printer) and tell them when they get a new computer just go to the searchbar and type in \\printservername\printername and this will connect you and install the printer.
Then, if they have user codes set up, they need to go into their printing defaults and put the user code in the Valid Access tab (I usually use a PCL5 driver for my installs). I recently saw where one real estate office was using a web based application that created a flyer using Adobe Flash and it would not retain the User Code. This created a problem because agents where unaware that they needed to enter their code or how to enter their code. When you put the user code in the advanced options tab under printing defaults it added the user code to any client computer that did not already have a code. So now everyone who didn't have a user code is printing using the last person's code...I can't even make this stuff up.
Also, when there is a "community computer" in the conference room or somewhere users have a time remembering or realizing they have to put their codes in.
Over the year I have experimented with pop-up drivers with no success. It would be so much more simple if there was just a check box in the driver to pop up a user code window.
I'd appreciate any input.
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