Introduction
The Workforce Experience Platform (WXP) provides printer groups to help you efficiently organize and manage your entire printer fleet. This overview explains how to plan a grouping strategy, use rule sets to automatically assign printers, and understand printer group behaviors and limitations.
Target Audience
IT administrators who onboard and manage printers.
Printer Administrators who onboard and manage printers.
Printer Groups
WXP uses groups to organize the printers in your fleet. However, printer groups are also central to WXP printer management logic. Together with printer policies, groups let you create and enforce custom security and functionality profiles for subsets of your fleet.
HP recommends that before you onboard your printer fleet to WXP, you plan your grouping strategy and create your own printer groups. Having a well-considered grouping strategy can help you maximize WXP's fleet management capabilities.
By default, when you onboard printers, WXP initially places them in the default group, named “Ungrouped”. If you define rule sets for your printer groups, WXP can automatically sort ungrouped printers into the appropriate groups.
Using Printer Group Rule Sets to Automatically Group Printers
When you create a printer group, WXP allows you to create a set of rules that defines which printers in your fleet the group can contain. WXP uses the collective rule sets for all your groups to assess any ungrouped printers and automatically move them into the appropriate group.
Note
You can also manually move printers into a group or from one group to another at any time.
When creating rule sets for groups, you should be aware of the following WXP behaviors:
If a printer meets the rules of multiple groups, it is not sorted and remains in “Ungrouped”. You’ll need to manually move these printers into the desired group.
Only ungrouped printers can be automatically grouped. After a printer is assigned to a group, it will remain in that group unless it is manually removed or moved to a different group by an IT or printer administrator.
Printers that are removed from a group will return to “Ungrouped”. Similarly, if a group containing printers is deleted, those printers will return to “Ungrouped”. If newly ungrouped printers meet the rules of a different group, they will be assigned to that group.
Important!
When a printer is initially onboarded, WXP receives the printer’s properties over a series of calls between itself and the printer. WXP will not assign the printer to any group until all the printer properties are available. This process takes some time--possibly up to several hours--to complete, especially if many printers are being onboarded at once. During this time, the printer will remain in “Ungrouped”.
How Printer Group Rules are Built
Each group rule is comprised of the following components:
Rule Component | Description |
Property | Specifies a printer property. Currently, you can create rules based on the following printer properties:
|
Operator | Specifies the relationship between the property and the specified value(s). Currently, a rule can contain one of the following operators:
|
Value | Specifies the property value to be matched, contained, or not matched. For some properties (Firmware version, Hostname), you can select from among the values contained in a dropdown. For the rest, values are entered manually in the field. You can specify multiple values. Firmware version and Hostname each allow you to select multiple values from the dropdown list. For other properties, separate multiple values using a comma. |
A rule set can contain up to five individual rules. For example, if you want to apply a policy to all the color printers in your London office, you might create a group named London color printers and define the following rule set for it:
Printer location equals London
Model Name contains Color
When WXP assesses the ungrouped printers against this rule, any ungrouped printers in your fleet that have Color within the model name (for example, HP Cand their location set to London are automatically moved to the London MFPs group.
Contact Us
For any assistance, create a support case or email support@wxp.hp.com.