I’m running into a licensing issue with BarTender (printer-based licensing) and hoping someone has dealt with this before.

Problem

We have several label printers that are installed locally on individual user accounts/workstations. The issue is that:

• The same physical printer is installed on multiple machines/users
• BarTender detects these as different (unique) printers
• This causes our printer license count to increase unnecessarily

As a result, we’re hitting our license limits even though we’re only using a small number of actual physical printers.

Root cause (as far as we understand)

BarTender seems to identify printers based on:

• Printer name
• Driver
• Port / configuration

Because these differ slightly per user/workstation, the same printer is treated as a new device each time.

Question

What is the best way to prevent duplicate printer detection across users?

We’re looking for a solution or best practice to:

• Ensure each physical printer is only counted once

• Avoid unnecessary license consumption