Latest / The Windows Podcast with Fexingo: Microsoft, PC, and Enterprise Windows Conversations / Windows 11 Is Redefining Enterprise Printer Drivers
Transcript
- Lucas: So Luna, here's a number that stopped me this week: according to a survey from a managed print services firm, the average enterprise still supports something like fourteen different printer driver packages across their fleet. Luna: Fourteen. That's insane. And I bet half of those are for printers that were manufactured before Windows 8. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the problem Windows 11 is now forcing IT departments to finally confront. Microsoft has been quietly deprecating the old driver model — the one where every printer vendor shipped their own bloated, often buggy driver package — in favor of the Microsoft IPP Class Driver. Luna: IPP being Internet Printing Protocol, right? So it's basically a universal driver that speaks a standard protocol instead of relying on vendor-specific software. Lucas: Right. And Windows 11, especially the 24H2 update which hit broad deployment earlier this year, made the IPP Class Driver the default for any printer that supports it. If your printer speaks IPP — and most modern ones do — Windows 11 won't even offer to install the vendor's driver. It just uses the inbox one. Luna: Which sounds great in theory — fewer drivers to manage, smaller attack surface, less bloat. But I'm guessing the reality for a lot of IT teams has been bumpier. Lucas: Considerably bumpier. Because the IPP Class Driver works well for basic printing — text documents, simple PDFs — but it struggles with advanced features. Things like stapling, hole punch, booklet printing, custom paper trays, even some color management profiles. If your finance department needs to print checks with MICR toner, or your legal team needs secure print release with PIN codes, the IPP driver often can't handle it. Luna: So the IT team is caught between a Microsoft mandate and the business's actual needs. That's a rough spot. Lucas: Yeah. And this is where I think the show today could really help someone. If this conversation is giving you something to think about — or maybe saving you a headache down the road — honestly, if it was worth a coffee to you, you can throw a couple bucks at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's what keeps this show ad-free and lets us dig into these gritty topics. Luna: Totally. We don't have sponsors breathing down our necks, so we can be as specific and honest as we want. And these printer driver migrations are exactly the kind of thing that costs companies real money if they get it wrong. Lucas: Right. So let's get into what 'getting it wrong' actually looks like. I talked to an IT director at a mid-sized law firm — about 400 users — who started their Windows 11 rollout in early 2025. They had a fleet of about sixty Canon multifunction printers, all using Canon's own PCL6 driver deployed via Group Policy. Luna: Classic setup. What happened when they moved to Windows 11? Lucas: First, Windows 11 refused to install the Canon driver. It would only use the Microsoft IPP Class Driver. Suddenly, all those printers stopped doing secure print release. The PIN pop-up just didn't appear. Users could walk up to any printer and their documents would print immediately — huge security breach in a law firm. Luna: Oh, that's a nightmare. So they had to go back and reconfigure? Lucas: They had two options. One: disable the IPP driver enforcement via a Group Policy setting — there's a policy called 'Configure printer driver selection behavior' that lets you force Windows to prefer vendor drivers. But that's a band-aid, because future updates might remove that policy. Two: migrate to Universal Print — Microsoft's cloud-based print solution — which does support secure release, but requires each printer to be cloud-connected and each user to have a license. Luna: And licenses cost money. I think Universal Print is around five dollars per user per month? Lucas: About that. For a 400-user firm, that's twenty thousand dollars a year just for the print infrastructure. Versus the old model where you paid for a print server and driver support was essentially free. So the ROI calculation gets complicated. Luna: And that's before you factor in the printers themselves. If your printers are older than five years, they might not even support IPP natively. Then what? Lucas: Then you're stuck. Windows 11 can still use a 'vendor-supplied' driver, but Microsoft is making it harder. Starting with Windows 11 version 24H2, any driver that isn't signed with a new SHA-2 certificate from Microsoft's Hardware Dev Center won't install. And many older drivers — from HP, Brother, Lexmark — haven't been recertified. Luna: So there's a ticking clock. IT departments need to audit their printer fleet now, not when Windows 11 updates break everything. Lucas: Exactly. And the real kicker is that Microsoft's own guidance says the IPP Class Driver is 'the recommended driver for all printers' going forward. They're essentially telling vendors: stop writing your own drivers. And HP, for instance, has already announced they'll no longer develop new versions of the HP Universal Print Driver for Windows. The last update was in 2024. Luna: So the vendor is abandoning the old model, Microsoft is blocking it, and IT is left holding the bag. This is a classic platform shift moment. Lucas: It really is. And the smartest move I've seen is from a manufacturing company I spoke with. They have about 250 printers across three plants — a mix of thermal label printers, industrial inkjets, and office MFPs. They decided to split their approach: for office printers that only do basic printing, they let Windows 11 use the IPP driver. But for the industrial printers — the ones that print shipping labels with barcodes — they built a dedicated print server running Windows 10 LTSC with the vendor drivers locked down. Luna: That's clever. Isolate the mission-critical printers on a legacy OS that won't get the driver-breaking updates. But LTSC has its own support timeline, right? Lucas: Windows 10 LTSC is supported until 2031, so they have runway. But they're also testing a Universal Print pilot for the office printers, with a goal to eventually move everything to the cloud and eliminate the print server entirely. That would save them the hardware cost of three print servers and the admin time of patching them. Luna: So the endgame really is Universal Print for most organizations. But the migration path is messy, especially for those advanced features. Lucas: And that's where I think Microsoft has been slow. They added 'advanced print capabilities' to Universal Print in late 2024 — things like secure release and accounting — but it's still not at parity with a full vendor driver. For instance, if you need to print on envelopes or legal-size paper from a specific tray, the IPP driver might not let you select that tray. It depends on how well the printer's IPP implementation advertises the options. Luna: Which brings up another angle: printer firmware. A lot of these issues can be fixed if the printer vendor updates the firmware to properly expose features via IPP. But many enterprises have printers that haven't seen a firmware update in years. Lucas: Right. And the vendors aren't always motivated to push updates for old hardware. So IT is in a position where they might need to replace printers that are perfectly functional, just because the driver ecosystem is moving on. Luna: That's a hard conversation with the CFO. 'We need to replace fifty printers that work fine because Microsoft changed the driver model.' Lucas: Yeah. And I think that's the real story here. Windows 11 isn't just an OS update — it's a forcing function for IT to modernize print infrastructure that has been neglected for a decade. Print servers are often the last on-premises workload, and Microsoft is essentially saying, 'Move to the cloud or deal with a broken experience.' Luna: So what's your advice to an IT manager listening right now? First steps? Lucas: Three things. One: audit every printer's IPP support. You can check by going to the printer's web interface and looking for IPP or IPPS under protocols. If it's there, test the Microsoft IPP Class Driver with your critical workflows. Two: identify any printers that absolutely require vendor-specific features — like secure print, custom paper sizes, or specialty finishing. Those are the ones you might need to isolate on a legacy print server or replace. Three: start a Universal Print trial with a subset of users. Microsoft offers a free 90-day trial, and it'll show you exactly where the gaps are. Luna: And for the printers that don't support IPP at all? The really old ones? Lucas: Replace them. Seriously. If a printer doesn't support IPP by now, it's likely end of life anyway, and the security risk of running an unsupported driver on Windows 11 isn't worth it. The IPP Class Driver is actually more secure — it runs in a restricted sandbox and doesn't require admin privileges to install. Luna: So there's a silver lining: fewer drivers mean fewer vulnerabilities. The old vendor drivers were notorious for buffer overflows and insecure update mechanisms. Lucas: Exactly. HP alone had a dozen critical CVEs in their print drivers over the past few years. By moving to a Microsoft-signed inbox driver, you're reducing that attack surface dramatically. And with Universal Print, you also get audit logging and conditional access policies — so you can control who prints what based on Azure AD groups. Luna: That's actually a compelling security argument for the migration. It's not just about cost — it's about reducing risk. Lucas: Right. And I think as we move into the second half of 2026, more organizations will start feeling the pressure. Windows 11 adoption among enterprises is now above sixty percent, and each feature update tightens the screws on legacy drivers. The IT directors who start planning now will have a much smoother path than those who wait until a printer workflow breaks mid-quarter. Luna: Good advice. And on that note, we'll be back next episode with another gritty Windows 11 reality check. Lucas: Thanks for listening, everyone. We'll talk to you soon.