We have a Ricoh Aficio SP 5210SF multifunction printer which is set up to send scanned documents to various network shares. Previously the printer was set up to send the scans to a user's folder on a Windows Server 2003 R2 installation. We've recently replaced that server with a new one running Windows Server 2012 R2, but we've come to find out that the Ricoh's firmware doesn't support connecting to smb shares on Windows Server 2012/R2. The interim solution is to send the scanned documents to the user's workstation, but the problem there is that the documents are no longer on the server, and thus cannot be backed up with the installed remote backup software.

What I've tried to do, is to make a link to the user's share on the server, place it on their desktop, and then share that out to the network. Even after setting the permissions properly, no other device could access a share on a machine which pointed to a share on the server. I've come to realize that this has to do with the way symbolic links are handled client-side when browsing SMB shares on a network. The only potential way around this would be to use junction links, which are handled server-side, but those are restricted to pointing to local files/folders (so junctions are out of the question).

Basically, I'm trying to use each individual user's workstation as a proxy to their share on the server (yes I know this is an ugly solution). The only other solutions I can think of are to virtualize Server 2008 R2, or possibly Windows 7 on the server, and set up the shares that way (assuming Hyper-V allows you to pass through folders in a way other than SMB, which I haven't looked into yet). Or, set up CentOS in a VM with Samba, and connect to the physical server using NFS.

Unfortunately, there is no budget for a new printer, so that is out of the question. I also cannot find a firmware update anywhere.

Has anyone else ran into a situation like this before? If so, what was your solution and how did you go about implementing it?