IT Ideas

We have been using Papercut to offer managed Cloud Printing for our ChromeOS users for many years now. The most recent v17 release of Papercut introduces Mobility Print  which allows direct printing to your networked devices. From the end users point of view, it's almost the same as using Cloud Print, however, there are a few important differences. Mobility Print does not require your print server to talk to the internet. For Cloud Printing, this can be tricky as for Cloud Print to work you really need to bypass any ssl inspection you do for that server. Its faster - doesn't need to send jobs to the cloud and back. Will work even if Google Cloud Printing has one of its moments - rare - but they do happen! You need to push the Mobility Print Chrome App . The printer is deployed to anyone with the app installed - not shared to groups or individuals as in Cloud Printing. You need to do a little DNS work for it to function across vlans. This is what it looks like as a...

You might want to block ads across your entire network. There are various approaches to doing this. Ad Blocking Extensions You can push these to Chrome via Chrome Management and Group Policy. While these work well, users can configure then and they do have an impact on performance. It only applies to the browsers on managed devices and one browser. You cannot easily configure what is blocked centrally. Content Filter Your content filter/firewall may have an option to configure this. Manually adding to your hosts file.  This is what we do. You can download a hosts file that will block most ads here . This can be added to your gateways hosts file and this will block ads for all devices and browsers with no configuration required on client devices. This will apply to all devices and browsers. You can also manually tweak what is blocked for everyone. Video of how to do this on a Linux gateway below: