If you’ve been running end user computing for more than a couple of years, you’ve probably noticed that printing has a way of showing up in projects that were never supposed to be about printing. A hypervisor gets swapped out, and somewhere in week three someone asks why the ward printers stopped mapping. A clinical application gets upgraded, and the label printers that were fine on Friday are producing blank stock on Monday. A new site comes online after an acquisition, and the help desk inherits forty printers nobody documented, on drivers nobody chose.
None of those projects had “print” in the charter. All of them ended up with a print workstream, usually discovered late, usually paid for out of somebody’s weekend.
That pattern is the subject of this post. The argument is simple enough to fit on a slide, which is why we also made it into one: IT is going to keep changing, and every one of those changes touches printing, so the sensible move is to solve print once, in a layer that doesn’t depend on whichever platform happens to be underneath it this year. What follows is the longer version, with the dates and the mechanics, because a slide can’t hold those and this audience is right to want them.
The carousel lists seven. They’re not hypothetical; they’re the ones we keep seeing on customer calls in 2026, and each breaks printing in a slightly different way.
This is the one generating the most calls right now, and there are two dated reasons for that. Citrix stopped supporting file-based licensing on 15 April 2026, and the replacement License Activation Service needs your license server or NetScaler Console to stay registered with Citrix Cloud and check in daily, with a 30-day grace period before an unreachable endpoint invalidates the activation. Citrix’s own support article describes the alternative as “a loss of functionality and impact end-user access.” A couple of weeks later, on 4 May 2026, Omnissa raised Horizon pricing by 7 percent on bundles that include VVF for VDI and by 16 to 21 percent on bundles without it, and the increase lands on new purchases and expansion licenses specifically, which is the part a growing organisation actually has to buy.
So a lot of shops are moving, mostly toward AVD or Windows 365, and often running two platforms side by side for a year or more while they do it. Here is the thing about printing that tends to surprise people mid-migration: Citrix printing is not a feature of your print servers, it’s a feature of the VDA. Universal Print Server is split into a server piece on your Windows print servers and a client piece that ships inside the VDA and is switched on by Citrix policy. The Universal Print Driver, session printer assignments by client name or IP or OU, auto-created client printers, the driver mapping rules, the routing choices between client and print server: all of that is ICA policy. Retire the VDA and the client half of UPS leaves with it. Your print servers are still there, with their queues and their drivers, but nothing on an AVD session host knows how to talk to them the way a Citrix session did.
To be fair to the migration guides, Nerdio’s Citrix-to-AVD playbook does flag this. It tells you to inventory every printer, driver and Citrix access policy in Phase 1, and it says plainly that “print redirection is a common source of post-migration tickets, and the architecture changes completely.” Where it stops is the recommendation to cut over to Microsoft Universal Print, and that’s worth a closer look, because Universal Print is a good product that solves a different problem than the one Citrix UPS was solving.
What AVD gives you natively is RDP printer redirection, controlled by the redirectprinters property on the host pool. Microsoft’s documentation, updated in May 2026, is clear that it’s all or nothing: “When you enable printer redirection, all printers available on the local device are redirected; you can’t select specific printers to redirect.” The session host uses the Remote Desktop Easy Print driver, so at least you’re not installing vendor drivers on the host, but the driver has to exist on the endpoint, and Easy Print is generic by design, which is why tray selection, finishing options and label stock are usually the first tickets in.
Universal Print sits alongside that rather than replacing it. Its per-user, roaming, location-aware behaviour on AVD only applies on Windows 11 multi-session 22H2 or later, with location override enabled on every VM; on older hosts, Microsoft’s own AVD page says users “will still experience the issues described in the Universal Print Known Issues article,” and that page was last touched in April 2023. It doesn’t manage a user’s local USB printer at all, so you’ll be running redirection anyway. And there is nothing in it that maps “this user, from this thin client, on this ward, gets that printer by default.” That was a Citrix policy job, and on AVD it becomes a scripting job or a help desk job unless something else takes it on.
The second and third changes on the carousel are really about the driver problem, and they’ve acquired a calendar of their own this year. It’s worth being precise about it, because a good chunk of the vendor content on this subject is still running a story Microsoft has retracted.
Microsoft’s end-of-servicing plan for third-party printer drivers has three dates. From 15 January 2026, no new third-party drivers are published to Windows Update for Windows 11 and Windows Server 2025 onward. From 1 July 2026, Windows changes its driver ranking to always prefer the built-in IPP inbox class driver. From 1 July 2027, third-party driver updates are limited to security fixes. Existing drivers can still be installed, from Windows Update or from the manufacturer’s package, after every one of those dates.
In February 2026 a Windows Roadmap entry went further and said V3 and V4 drivers would stop being supported altogether. Microsoft pulled it within days and put this in writing: “Windows has not ended support for legacy printer drivers. If your printer works with Windows today, it will continue to work, and no action is required.” So nothing is being switched off. If you read otherwise on a vendor blog, that’s the retracted version.
What is true, and what matters if you’re rebuilding session host images or rolling new endpoints this year, is that a fresh Windows image discovering a printer after 1 July 2026 will reach for the IPP class driver before the vendor driver you thought you’d standardised on. Your new AVD image will not behave like your old Citrix gold image, and the endpoints won’t behave like the ones they replaced. If you’re touching the images anyway, this is the moment to decide how many vendor drivers you’re willing to carry forward. For most multi-session hosts, the defensible answer is none.
Application changes break printing in a way that has nothing to do with the platform, and the example that landed in most people’s inboxes last month is a good one. Microsoft’s August 2026 .NET Framework cumulative update broke printing and PDF export in WPF applications across Windows 10, 11 and Server 2012 through 2025, throwing a System.IO.FileFormatException when certain fonts were involved. The workaround Microsoft published is an AppContext switch, with the caveat that using it “will also disable protections introduced with the August 2026 .NET Framework update.” That’s the kind of choice nobody wants to make on a Tuesday, and it’s one you’re forced into faster when the application, the OS, the driver and the session platform are all tangled together in one print path.
The healthcare version of this is familiar: a clinical application upgrade changes how it renders a wristband or a specimen label, the change interacts with a vendor driver on the session host, and the fix involves three teams and a change window. Every time the application moves, the print path has to be retested end to end.
Cloud PCs are on the carousel because they’re increasingly where the “we’re not really doing VDI anymore” conversation ends up, and they come with a default worth knowing before the first pilot: printer redirection is disabled on newly provisioned and reprovisioned Cloud PCs. Users will sign in and have no printers until you enable it through Intune or Group Policy. The licensing arithmetic also deserves a look if you’re leaning on Universal Print. Microsoft 365 E3, E5 and Business Premium include 100 print jobs per user per month, pooled across the tenant. Microsoft 365 F3 includes 5. Frontline staff are usually the ones on F3, and they’re also the ones printing pick tickets, wristbands and discharge paperwork, so run the numbers before anyone says “it’s included.”
The seventh change is less about technology than inheritance. An acquired site arrives with its own print servers, its own drivers, sometimes its own platform, and a help desk that has to support all of it from day one while the integration plan is still a slide deck. If printing is bound to the platform, integrating the site means migrating the printers, which means every printer becomes a small project. If printing is its own layer, the new site’s printers get added to the layer and the platform question can be answered later, on its own timeline.
Look at those seven again and notice what they have in common. In every case, the thing that broke was the coupling: printing was implemented inside the platform, or inside the image, or inside the application’s assumptions about a driver, so when that thing changed, printing changed with it. The cost isn’t any single incident. It’s that the same work gets done over and over, once per change, by people who have other things to do.
The alternative is to treat printing the way you already treat identity or profiles: as a layer that sits across platforms rather than inside one of them. That means printers are assigned by user, group, client or location in one place, and the assignment holds whether the session lands on Citrix, Horizon, AVD, Windows 365 or plain RDS on any given morning. It means the session host carries one universal driver instead of a vendor driver per model, so image rebuilds and the IPP ranking change stop being print events. It means the driver logic lives on the endpoint or in the layer, not in the application’s line of sight. And it means that during a coexistence period, both platforms print identically, which is the single biggest thing you can do for ticket volume, because otherwise every print ticket opens with “which platform were you on?”
This is where ScrewDrivers fits, and it’s fair to say exactly where. It is a print and scan layer that doesn’t live inside the VDA or the host pool. The endpoint client renders the job, the session host sees one universal driver, and the same configuration applies across Citrix, Omnissa Horizon, AVD, Windows 365 and RDS. Printer assignment by user, client, location or group is done in one console and stays put while the platform underneath changes. Customers who deploy it before a migration, rather than after, tend to have the quietest cutovers, because the print layer is already proven on the old platform when the first new host pool goes live, and nothing about printing has to be redone at the end. Licensing is by concurrent user, which turns out to be the right model in a year when expansion licences are what got more expensive.
It’s also worth saying what it isn’t. It isn’t a replacement for Universal Print on Entra-joined laptops that never open a session, and it isn’t a replacement for GPO or Intune as a way of deploying software. It manages printing and scanning inside sessions and across sites. If that’s not the problem you have, it’s not the tool, and we’d rather say so here than on a support call.
Every one of the seven changes above is going to happen to you again. Some are already scheduled. The practical question isn’t whether printing will be affected, because it will be; it’s whether you’ll be solving it inside each project, or once, in a layer those projects don’t touch.
If you have a migration on the calendar, the exercise we’d suggest is short. Export your current printing policies, whatever platform they live in, and next to each one write down what replaces it on the target. Count the F3 users and estimate their print volume. Pick the local-printer story and test it against the applications people actually print from, especially the label printers. Tag print tickets separately in the ITSM before cutover so you can see what the migration did to them, since neither the DaaS vendor’s console nor a DEX dashboard will show you. And decide, before the first host pool goes live, whether the print layer is going to be part of the platform again or something that finally survives it.
Does Citrix Universal Print Server work with Azure Virtual Desktop? No. The UPClient component is part of the Citrix VDA and is enabled by Citrix policy. AVD session hosts have no VDA and can’t use UPServer, though the Windows print servers UPServer runs on can still be used by other means.
Does Microsoft Universal Print replace Citrix UPS? Partly. It handles finding and connecting to registered network printers from the cloud. It doesn’t replace session printer policies, doesn’t handle local USB printer redirection, and its per-user behaviour on AVD requires Windows 11 multi-session 22H2 or later.
Did Microsoft end support for legacy printer drivers in 2026? No. Microsoft retracted that claim in February 2026. The real changes are that no new third-party drivers are published to Windows Update from 15 January 2026, Windows prefers the IPP class driver from 1 July 2026, and third-party driver updates are limited to security fixes from 1 July 2027. Existing drivers continue to install and work.
Does printing work on Windows 365 Cloud PCs by default? Printer redirection is disabled by default on newly provisioned and reprovisioned Cloud PCs and has to be enabled through Intune or Group Policy.
Is Universal Print included in Microsoft 365 F3? Yes, with 5 print jobs per user per month, pooled across the tenant. E3, E5 and Business Premium include 100. Additional volume is sold in monthly packs of 500 or 10,000 jobs.
What does “solve print once” actually mean? Implementing printing as a layer that isn’t tied to any one session platform, image or application, so that migrations, upgrades, rollouts and new sites change the platform without changing how printing is configured, assigned or supported.