Lukas Beeler’s IT Blog

I had an interesting call - a customer bought a multi function device on their own, and wanted it integrated in their network. I’ve always made bad experiences when customers bought equipment on their own, because usually the devices aren’t really fit for the intended purpose - SOHO equipment is not meant for companies with their own servers.

In this case, the customer bought a HP Photosmart C5100 All-in-One device. This thing looked rather fragile, but it came with an ethernet interface, which would probably make life a lot easier to integrate it into the server. The device couldn’t do Scan-to-Email, Scan-to-Share, it couldn’t integrate with Active Directory, in fact it doesn’t even speak PCL or PS.

My first try was to just install the print driver on the server, but even that was a no go. HP’s spec don’t state compatibility with Windows Server 2003, but i tried anyway. It didn’t work, Spoolsv.exe crashed right after installing the driver.

So i couldn’t even integrate the printing function into the network. I’ve installed HP’s Software onto the two PCs where the printer will get used primarily. This worked flawlessly (though i didn’t install HP’s Photo Smart Suite, just the drivers). Interesting is that you can access the Memory Card reader installed into the device using a standard SMB share - that’s a rather elegant solution.

In the end, it seems to work so far. But it’s not an elegant, and by no means a well integrated solution.

HP does offer solutions like the OfficeJet 9100, which is just a little bit more expensive, but has a lot more functionality. With the proper plug in (license) card, it even supports Active Directory.