Sanity check: Print Server upgrade
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
If you have your OUs setup by location and department (as the norm) you should just be deploy the printers in GPOs within that OU.
Cool. But don't I apply the AD group to the OU?
No, How would you do that? Users, groups and computers can be in an OU. The OU is just a folder really.
I'm probably showing my ignorance here. Can I just create a GPO called "Accounts Printers" and then add the "Accounts" AD security group under security filtering? Or is that a dumbass way of proceeding?
Looks like how I'd do it as well.
As for how long it should take, I'd guesstimate it would be around 6 hours or less to give you 4+ of troubleshooting. If all goes well, one should be able to create 15 security groups and 1 GPO with 15 printers in under 1 hour, assuming all of the needed info/drivers are already available. Assuming you don't want to pay the consultants to download the drivers, you should do that first.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
If anything, I'd assumed that we would have less issues with 2012r2 than 2003, since it's 64-bit and all our clients are Windows 7. 2012R2 and Windows 7 will be using the same drivers won't they?
If anyone has any links to a good read on how a printer server actually works, or can give me a really basic overview, I'd be really grateful.
Anyone? Googling over my lunch hour, I'm guessing that it depends on whether you tick the box "Render the print jobs on client computers". If ticked, the Windows 7 client will render the document and send the RAW file to the print server. So the print server just sends the file to the printer - there is no driver issue. But if unticked, the server will render the file using the driver that it has installed. So if there is a different driver on the client and the server, I guess you could have issues?
It seems that the default should always be to render the jobs on the client though, which keeps things simple.
I can't change this setting on my existing 2003 server anyway, because it's not a supported feature of 2003. Yet when I look on the clients, this setting is ticked.
I find it all a bit confusing and this is exactly why I wanted to outsource the job. I really don't want to be learning about print servers during my lunch break. But in the words of Al Pacino:
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@Dashrender said:
If all goes well, one should be able to create 15 security groups and 1 GPO with 15 printers in under 1 hour, assuming all of the needed info/drivers are already available. Assuming you don't want to pay the consultants to download the drivers, you should do that first.
The tricky bit is, they might be looking to stack up the hours, so I suspect they will fight/argue about it tooth and nail to raise the hours. I would hesitate to assume a printer vendor carries IT professionals whose goal is to swoop in, do the job, swoop out rapidly.
@Carnival-Boy said:
Another quick question as I really don't know how print servers work. My vendor has expressed concerns about printer compatibility with Server 2012r2.
Could be valid here. How old are the printers? If they were bought during the XP era then you might have a problem. If they are newer than that, then you should be absolutely fine.
When they "expressed concerns" what does that mean in reality? Did they tell you:
A) You need to buy new printers
B.) This job will take longer for us, therefore pay us more.
C) We think we can do it BUT there might be issues, we've not done printers to 2012R2 before.It could be...you need to just bypass the printer vendor and look for a UK IT consultant to just swing in and do it, this should be dead easy to do.
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They're not printer vendors, they're "IT Solutions Specialists".
They've quoted 3 to 4 days.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
They're not printer vendors, they're "IT Solutions Specialists".
They've quoted 3 to 4 days.
Would you mind private messaging me who they are?
I can do much much bigger projects which would take 3-4 days. They sound very special.
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Something seems very wrong here. Either you have left out a very big important piece of the puzzle or they are hideously over-quoting you.
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I can't think of anything I've missed. It has been bothering me all weekend. Hence the reason I've started a thread on it!
They've already spent 4 hours on-site preparing a statement of works. I'm confused as to why that took so long.
From the outset, I thought it would take a day, at most.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
They've already spent 4 hours on-site preparing a statement of works. I'm confused as to why that took so long.
With respect, sounds like they are taking you for a ride. Like...they should have done the entire job in 4 hours.
Have you signed anything yet? -
@Breffni-Potter said:
Have you signed anything yet?
Hell, no.
It's not a case of taking me for a ride. I've used them for years and been relatively satisfied, and they know I'm pretty experienced generally - even if I'm a crap at printers.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I can't think of anything I've missed. It has been bothering me all weekend. Hence the reason I've started a thread on it!
They've already spent 4 hours on-site preparing a statement of works. I'm confused as to why that took so long.
From the outset, I thought it would take a day, at most.
I worked for a consulting/MSP a while ago where an employee there had no idea what he was doing, tried installing a network printer, after 2 days (16 billable hours), he recruited another tech to help out billing at double rate for another day, plus. Even after that, a third tech was called in, who did finally get the new printer working in about 1 hour. Unbelievably the techs submitted 40 hours of billable time to the customer to install this printer.
Rightfully so, the customer called a meeting with our company and refused to pay 5 times or more as much for installation as the cost of the printer.
I'm guessing they have no idea how to do what you want, and they are going to charge you for their education as well as the service.
You already sound like you know how to do this, I'd skip the outside support.
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I have had installation engineers from printer vendors who are really hopeless and I've ended up doing the driver installations myself because they were so clueless. In their defence, they were basically photocopier repairmen, not Windows techs, but their employers makes them doing work they're not trained for. They're fantastic when it comes to a paper jam.
That's not the case here though. I've been scratching my head a bit.
@Dashrender said:
I'm guessing they have no idea how to do what you want, and they are going to charge you for their education as well as the service.
I'm guessing that too.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I have had installation engineers from printer vendors ...
Installation engineer - LOL thanks, I needed that.
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@Dashrender said:
I'm guessing they have no idea how to do what you want, and they are going to charge you for their education as well as the service.
Which for really special cases they should. Internal IT always charges for that, MSPs do it far less, but it still has to come somewhere. At the end of the day, clients are the only source of revenue so all education is paid for by the clients. There is just more chance of spreading it out over lots of clients rather than all being paid for by one.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I'm guessing they have no idea how to do what you want, and they are going to charge you for their education as well as the service.
Which for really special cases they should. Internal IT always charges for that, MSPs do it far less, but it still has to come somewhere. At the end of the day, clients are the only source of revenue so all education is paid for by the clients. There is just more chance of spreading it out over lots of clients rather than all being paid for by one.
So are you saying this is a case where he should be paying them for 3-4 days so they learn how to do this?
If it were my company (the MSP) I'd make my guys do this in our own lab so they understand the process, then go and bill the client the more normal time for a service like this. MSPs are paid $150+/hr because they already know how to do these things, they already spent the money on training and that cost is being spread out over many clients through the higher than hourly cost of the tech, but lower than all of the time learning said skill for the tech.
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I don't expect consultants to know everything, and I always factor in a element of learning stuff whilst they're working for me. But you've got to get the balance right. Say 80/20 in my favour - so 80% of the time they're doing stuff they know, 20% they're figuring things out as they go along.
Or to put it another way, if they spent 80% of their time on my site browsing Google, I wouldn't be very impressed!
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I don't expect consultants to know everything, and I always factor in a element of learning stuff whilst they're working for me. But you've got to get the balance right. Say 80/20 in my favour - so 80% of the time they're doing stuff they know, 20% they're figuring things out as they go along.
Or to put it another way, if they spent 80% of their time on my site browsing Google, I wouldn't be very impressed!
I can agree with that. There's also the difference between having no clue, and looking up something on Google to make sure you have the syntax correct, etc.
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@Dashrender said:
So are you saying this is a case where he should be paying them for 3-4 days so they learn how to do this?
the other option is that OTHER customers who might never use this have to pay. Who should pay, a one off one time customer or every customer?
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@Dashrender said:
I can agree with that. There's also the difference between having no clue, and looking up something on Google to make sure you have the syntax correct, etc.
That's true, but if you expect anyone in IT to have all the basics all the time, you are going to have a bad time. That's impossible. Part of every IT job is learning as you go. I learn something new at every engagement. Every environment and need is so unique that there is so little "common" knowledge that you have to learn new stuff every time.
Consultants are just IT pros like everyone else. Better resources, more active with more variety, etc. but those issues that plague internal IT plague MSPs too and cannot be avoided.
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@Dashrender said:
MSPs are paid $150+/hr because they already know how to do these things,
No, that's not why and that mentality is what causes problems. At $150/hr you are getting a normal, midlevel person at a "per hour" rate. That's how much it costs to deliver normal consulting, not for a specialist. Remember, non-IT bench work like GeekSquad is over $100/hr. That's how much it costs to have a minimum wage earner (by the hour) through a firm rather than paying someone an annual salary.
You are NOT paying for 80% of their time to be spent learning stuff somewhere else. Some, yes, like any professional. But the idea that MSPs do 80% of their time without billing and that's why you pay a little more for them by the hour is completely wrong. If that were the case, even midlevel people would be $1,000 an hour.
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@Dashrender said:
If it were my company (the MSP) I'd make my guys do this in our own lab so they understand the process, then go and bill the client the more normal time for a service like this.
I know of only one MSP anywhere that has a full lab. As great of an idea as that is, it's not normal. Now sure, the big ones probably do, but often limited to the equipment that they resell. NTG has a lab and we've never encountered any MSP or SMB that had one. They exist, but they are rare. Our lab is big enough to run a company of over 1,000 people in production. No SMB's environment is close to the size of our lab and our lab is truly a lab, no production workloads. (And we added a big server to it this week too!)
But this is a rarity, not the base case. Don't assume that your MSP can possibly afford to do this. If you were running your own MSP and charging only $150/hr you would quickly realize that you can't afford to pay salaried IT staff to do lab work on your dime while trying to maintain a cut-rate billing rate to clients for people working only 20% of the time - especially when the education that they get is for ONE client, not lots of them.
This varies by skill. If the skill is common and you expect people to do how to do that task, sure, you do it on lab time and you spread out the cost, but you aren't billing for spreading cost at $150/hr, that's bare bones trying to keep the lights on billing. But when you are doing something niche and there is no other customer to spread the cost to, you can't do that.
