Printers with properly set labels automatically changing names when added all over campus.

Question

Printers with properly set labels automatically changing names when added all over campus.

Jason Griffin 0

Hello,

We have specifically named our printers for obvious organization/convenience needs.

Students and teachers use them across campus and this would help them know what printer they are printing to.

When anyone on campus adds a printer they can choose from the names that we assigned to them and they can add it.

When windows installs it to the computer it automatically changes to the printer model name. This will not work for our campus as this has created confusion.

As far as I can tell this is a Windows issue that needs to be addressed. Is there a way for these to be added with the proper names that have been assigned to them? Having IT change the names on every computer is not acceptible.

IPP naming has been changed to the correct name.

Node names have been changed to the correct name.

I know this issue has been brought up before but I have not found a solution in any of the threads that have been created.

Thank you,

Jason

0 comments

1 answer

Your answer

Answer 1

Hello @Jason Griffin

What you're seeing can happen with modern IPP/class-driver printer discovery in Windows. The important distinction is between the printer's administrator-assigned/share name and the device information Windows retrieves from the printer itself.

With modern print class drivers, Windows can automatically determine the local print queue name from the printer's reported device information. Microsoft documents that Windows may use the device's FriendlyName, and if that's unavailable, its Manufacturer + ModelName. That explains why a carefully assigned campus name can appear as the printer model after installation.

So changing only the IPP URI/hostname or DNS name doesn't necessarily control the name Windows ultimately displays.

In a campus environment, I would avoid relying on users to discover and manually add raw IPP printers if consistent naming matters. A better approach is to centrally provision named printer queues/shares. If you're using Universal Print, for example, Microsoft separates the physical/registered printer from its Printer Share, and the share controls the name users see when discovering printers.

For Universal Print you could create names such as:

Library - 1st Floor - Color
Science Building - Room 204
Administration - Main Office
Student Center - 2nd Floor

and deploy those shares to the appropriate users/devices. Microsoft also provides a Universal Print CSP where PrinterSharedName identifies the share being installed, making centralized provisioning through MDM/Intune preferable to asking every user to discover printers manually.

If you're not using Universal Print and these are direct IPP printers, I would check what the printer itself advertises as its IPP/Bidi FriendlyName. Windows documentation specifically defines FriendlyName as a user-settable device name, while ModelName represents the actual printer model.

This also explains why changing the IPP/DNS name hasn't solved the problem—the name may come from the printer's advertised metadata rather than DNS.

I wouldn't recommend scripting a rename on every PC as the first solution. With a campus-wide deployment, centrally controlled printer shares/provisioning gives you more predictable naming and avoids the same physical printer appearing differently across machines.

If you can confirm whether these printers are being added via direct IPP discovery, a Windows Print Server, Universal Print, or Intune, we can narrow down exactly where to configure the display name.

Sharing these references with you:

Microsoft – V4 Driver Setup Concepts and automatic print queue naming

Microsoft – Universal Print printer sharing

Microsoft – Using the Microsoft IPP Class Driver

Please "Accept the Answer" if this information helped you. This will help us and others in the community.