Re: "the printer was no longer visible"
Google Cloud Print?
Go ask your local school.
Because it means that the kids are authenticated via their Google accounts (can be done without any AD integration by google-sync tools), they can print from their Google Classroom, Google Docs, Google Mail, etc. accounts (all free and unlimited storage for schools, by the way), no matter what device they print from (web, home PC, Chromebook, Android, iPad app, etc.) and it comes into the network as a Google Cloud Print account that you can plug direct into, say, PaperCut (so you are authenticated again, departmentalised, held-for-teacher-authorisation and billed accordingly before a printer is ever involved). Whether they are in the next room or the next continent (e.g. on holiday doing their homework, printing it to their teacher's printer to get it in on time, etc.)
Some things have uses. Even if they have the word Cloud in them.
And what horrendous, disgusting, terrible abuses of privacy are possible? The kids scribbles might be briefly visible to a bored tech at Google. Except they are one of the few companies (*cough* f*** you Apple) that provides EU data protection guarantees that state that your Google Education account data for ALL users will never leave the UK.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
