Print Server vs. Direct IP Printing

Written by

Deciding how to configure or maintain the printing environment always ends up being the system administrator’s headache. And the primary decision they need to make is whether they should set up print servers, or go with Direct IP printing. While there is no right or wrong choice between the two, each has its own benefits and downfalls.

Print Servers can offer your environment a handful of benefits. A few of them being:

  • Management of printers from a central location
  • Driver management
  • Print settings management
  • Print job auditing
  • Printer permissions
  • Job/queue management
  • Clustering and pooling of the printers

The benefits of print servers come at a cost though. You now have a single point of failure, the hardware is expensive, the software and licensing is expensive, and they can be high maintenance.

Direct IP printing has it’s own set of benefits, such as:

  • No single point of failure
  • Each computer maintains control of the print driver and settings
  • Print jobs use the local spooler
  • Low cost

While some the benefits of Direct IP are major, the price you pay to get those benefits could be enough to offset the idea of going the Direct IP route. You now have to manage the printers and drivers from each individual workstation, you no longer have print job/queue management, and you lose the ability to set printer permissions and priorities.

Learn how to eliminate the need for print servers while centrally managing Direct IP printing.

But what if there was a solution out there that gave you the benefits of a print server, while maintaining the stability and low cost of a Direct IP setup?

PrinterLogic offers a solution that eliminates the need for print servers while providing a way to centrally managing and install Direct IP printers. With PrinterLogic’s printer management solution, you can seamlessly convert your existing Microsoft or Novell print server environment over to Direct IP and manage all of the printers and drivers from a central administrator console that can be accessed from any computer on your network. Not only will you be able to manage your printers, you will also have numerous print job audit reports at your fingertips. To find out more about our solution, visit us at www.printerlogic.com for a demo and a free trial and see if it’s the right fit for you.

What Auditing Tools Are Available For Printing?

Written by

Posted by Jordan Lindsey

Auditing and cost saving has been and will always be a top priority for any company, and auditing your print environment is an incredible way to manage cost. Do you want to know how much toner is being used company-wide, or by department? Or how much paper is being used? How about checking to see if duplexing is being used on all possible printers?

When it comes to printing, there are several different 3rd party applications (PrinterLogic, PaperCut, Cirrato, Xerox, HP, Print Audit, to name a few) that enable print tracking and delivery of audit reports.

Here at PrinterLogic, our application offers an all-inclusive print management suite, but for the purpose of this post I will focus on outlining our powerful print auditing capabilities.

PrinterLogic allows you to easily manage and sort a wide range of options for print auditing. As a result, you get a range of powerful reports, awesome graphs, pie charts, and summaries of:

  • Printing by week or hour
  • Application usage
  • Job & page counts
  • Simplex/duplex
  • Color/B&W
  • Paper size used

Each of these reports provides different graphical views which make it easy to send reports to separate departments or teams for billing or other auditing needs. From here you can see individual print tracking for both users and printers.

When viewing the auditing reports of an individual domain user you can collect and see the date, time, user name, job title, computer name, department name, printer name, document name, amount of pages, whether color or duplexing was used, and what paper size was used. You can sort by printers and find out which are your most heavily or lightest used, enabling you to replace overused printers or phase out unused printers.

And unlike many solutions on the market, PrinterLogic Web Stack (formerly Printer Installer) will also audit your USB printers. Did someone bring in a printer from home? Are departments buying their own local printers without notifying IT? If they print it, PrinterLogic Web Stack will audit it! So regardless of whether you’re dealing with network or USB printers, PrinterLogic’s solution will handle all of the auditing for you.

If you’d like a demo of how this works, as well as a look at how PrinterLogic provides an all-encompassing print management solution (with or without print servers), visit us at www.printerlogic.com.

How To Fix Corrupt Printer Drivers

Written by

Posted by Nick Ball

Printer drivers can become corrupt for many different reasons. The majority of the time this happens when they are initially not installed correctly, and the mistake is not noticed immediately. Regardless of how it happened, diagnosing what is wrong with the driver and getting it fixed can be a pain.

An easy way to “fix” corrupt drivers is to replace them. However, this is usually easier said than done. Depending on your print environment, this could mean going to each workstation that is using that driver and replacing it manually in the printer settings. Or if you have a print server (which can itself cause problems with drivers), replacing the driver is usually not an option because it could be used on many printers and workstations.

One method for easily handling printer driver issues is to use PrinterLogic Web Stack (formerly Printer Installer), which can help replace drivers quickly and easily. With PrinterLogic Web Stack you can select separate drivers for each operating system and architecture, which helps you select the right driver for any circumstance in the first place, thus preventing corrupted drivers in the first place. It can also easily replace drivers across all workstations with a single action.

PrinterLogic Web Stack can help prevent corrupt drivers by managing how the printers are installed on the end user’s workstation. In addition to simplifying your print server-based environment, PrinterLogic Web Stack can also use Direct IP printing, enabling you to eliminate print servers. This helps cut down on mass driver failure because each workstation has its own queue instead of sharing the one on the print server. If a driver on a print server becomes corrupt, anyone using that print queue can no longer print. But with PrinterLogic Web Stack, because each workstation has its own queue, if a single queue has a corrupt driver only that machine is affected.

For a quick demo of how PrinterLogic Web Stack can help you easily fix corrupt drivers, contact us here. We’d be happy to show you how it works, and get you started with a free trial.