Announced back in March, Microsoft today said that its Universal Print service is available in public preview. The service is a cloud-based printing solution that"s meant to make your IT department"s life a bit easier by moving one more thing from on-prem to the cloud.
It takes Windows Server"s print functionality and lets Azure do all of the work. Admins can view all of their printers that are registered through the service on a dashboard, and obviously they can use that dashboard to manage them.
Obviously, there are no printers that natively support the feature just yet, so you"ll have to use a Universal Print proxy application. Microsoft had originally said that it"s working with Canon on this, but this time it just said it"s working with printer manufacturers, so presumably, there are more partners on-board.
From the end user perspective, nothing changes. They can continue printing the way that they always have. It should be a bit easier on IT, just as migrating things to the cloud tends to be, since it"s less hardware to manage. You"ll need to be running version 1903 of Windows 10 Enterprise or Education, and you"ll need to have an Azure AD tenant.