Universal Printer Drivers Aren't So Universal

The Name Game

Unfortunately, the discovery tool displayed rather arcane model numbers, not the more intuitive printer names I was used to seeing in the Printers and Faxes control panel. At the Framingham office, I was forced to use the IP address to identify each discovered printer. On the other hand, once you've discovered a printer, Mobile Express lets you give each a name that better describes the device.

After the initial discovery process, you can choose one printer and print a test page to it. That printer is automatically added to your list of printers (My Printers) in Mobile Express. To add others, you bring up the Xerox Mobile Express Driver Properties dialog, click on Printing Preferences and select Change Printer. Up pops the Xerox Mobile Printing dialog. The three buttons on the top of the Mobile Printing dialog let you view My Printers or the listing of discovered printers; you can also search for printers by IP address. By selecting each discovered printer, you can add it to the My Printers view.

Thereafter, Mobile Express remembers which printers are available in that location and shows you only those printers when you're there (although you can merge in lists of printers from other locations if you prefer to do so). For example, at Computerworld's Framingham office, Mobile Express initially found five networked printers on my floor. At my home office, it excluded the Framingham printers from its list, showing only what was available for my home. Printers that were offline were grayed out.

By default, Mobile Express will prompt you to choose a printer every time. That's the best setting if you frequently alternate between printers at a given location, since that option brings you directly to a pick list. You can, if you wish, set Mobile Express to automatically print to the last printer used in each location. But if you need to change printers thereafter, it's a multistep process that involves navigating through four levels of dialog boxes.

The Mobile Express Driver provides a consistent set of basic printing functions that work across all printers. These include the ability to do two-sided printing, N-up printing (multiple images per page), landscape/portrait mode, a black-and-white/color switch, and watermarks.

If you need more in-depth features, however, Mobile Express is no substitute for the original equipment device driver. It lets you choose a different paper tray, but it can't tell you what paper type resides in each -- or if there is any paper in the tray at all. It doesn't provide low-toner alerts or support any other status alerts or advanced features (except, of course, for Xerox-brand printers).

For example, with a Canon black-and-white printer at Computerworld, Mobile Express let me change basic functions such as landscape and portrait printing and one- or two-sided printing. I could choose paper size, tray and pages per sheet, or choose a booklet layout in portrait or landscape mode with or without borders. But other features offered by the Canon driver, such as scaling, text/graphics settings and status alerts, weren't available with Mobile Express.

Xerox says that Mobile Express' discovery tool will find all USB- or network-attached printers, but it didn't always find the printers I was looking for. For example, Mobile Express did discover a nearby HP printer in my subnet, but did not find a nearby HP LaserJet 4000 printer that is attached to a JetDirect 300x print server within the same subnet -- at least not initially. Later, I did another discovery pass, and it briefly appeared before disappearing again.

I was finally able to find the LaserJet 4000 by using the IP search function and add it to My Printers; I could then print to it without any problems.