Posted by Andrew Miller

Of the many responsibilities that fall to the IT department, managing the enterprise printing environment scores somewhere near the very bottom on the fun-o-meter. And if we’re honest, dealing with that environment from the end-user side doesn’t rank very highly on employees’ enjoyment scale, either. Probably for the very same reasons.

Which is why, like e-mail, enterprise printing is not only vital to the basic day-to-day function of your organization, its smooth operation is absolutely crucial to keeping employees happy. In other words: Devoting inordinate amounts of time to keeping the print environment up and running is simply a headache that goes with the IT territory, right?

False—or at least, it doesn’t have to be. If you were to eliminate print servers by deploying PrinterLogic’s printer management software throughout your organization, you could reduce the time you spend on managing printers by more than 50%. That’s what data collected by a recent TechValidate survey of hundreds of PrinterLogic customers revealed for more than 68% of respondents. Even better, 44% of enterprises reported a reduction in print management time of at least 70%.

How exactly does PrinterLogic let you experience the relief of eliminating print servers while drastically cutting the time that print management demands?

• 
  Central management:
  
  Via a single web-based printer management interface for the whole enterprise, you can deploy printers without GPOs, scripts or print servers. You can even set default preferences with a click. It doesn’t matter whether you have ten printers or ten thousand.
• 
  Lighten the network load:
  
  To reduce network congestion and speed up print times, PrinterLogic cuts out the hardware middlemen, so you can print directly to printers from end-point devices enterprise-wide. Furthermore, PrinterLogic can integrate with WAN caching technologies for local driver download. That also makes printer driver management a lot easier.
• 
  Remove single points of failure:
  
  In the event of a WAN outage or a host server failure, PrinterLogic enables your entire organization to continue printing without skipping a beat.

So you see, enterprise print management doesn’t have to be a time vortex. PrinterLogic lets you replicate all the functionality offered by traditional print servers while streamlining driver management, simplifying printer deployment, cutting service desk calls and slashing downtime. Now, what are you going to do with all that extra time on your hands?

Posted by Kyle Yardley

Orlando Florida was the site for Citrix Synergy 2015. Spirits were just as bright as the sunshine and the wonderful warm Florida weather. Attendees from all over the world showed up to learn more about ideas and products surrounding Citrix. Given the difficulty printing presents in a Citrix environment, we saw a steady stream of attendees wanting to learn more about how we can help them.

For all the benefits your Citrix environment provides, easy print management is simply not one of them. But with PrinterLogic’s web application you can eliminate all your print servers, even if your organization uses Citrix. The software provides three possible ways to provision printers into Citrix sessions.

• Using the Citrix Universal Printer—Using PrinterLogic to provision direct IP printers to the endpoint device, and then printing to the Citrix Universal Printer provides print job compression, driver-less printing and simplified administration.
• Using session Printers—Using PrinterLogic direct IP session printers provides print job compression, driver-less printing and simplified administration.
• Using Citrix Auto-Created Printers—Using PrinterLogic direct IP session printers provides instant printer creation, improved Citrix server performance, Citrix Universal Print Driver support, Proximity printing/location-based printing and Self-service printer installation.

Click here to read more about PrinterLogic and how we help you simplify Citrix Printing. If you haven’t already, let us give you a demo so you can see for yourself how we are working with customers to eliminate print servers and simplify their Citrix print environments.

Posted by Andrew Miller

Before you start reading, please be sure to check out our previous post on the subject of ROI and eliminating print servers in your organization using PrinterLogic. In that post we took a brief look at how quickly our customers surveyed typically saw ROI. And the stats were pretty impressive: Nearly half did so in under six months and 75% achieved ROI in 12 months or less.

We also gave some examples of enterprise printing turned cost-effective: The small K-12 school district that saw more than 100% ROI in three months, the Fortune 500 insurance company that saw more than 200% ROI after six months, or the government agency that saw a remarkable 400% ROI after eighteen months.

But how do those individual examples stack up in the aggregate?

That same TechValidate survey shows that an amazing 83% of our enterprise customers realized between 100 and 400% ROI after adopting PrinterLogic as their print management solution. A full 44% of those surveyed showed ROI of 100–199%. Another 44% of saw ROI of 200% or more, with some additional customers seeing ROI as high as 500% or greater.

Mind you, these weren’t similarly sized customers from one particular sector. They ran the gamut—small, medium and large organizations operating in fields ranging from education to agriculture, chemicals, insurance and IT. Such as the Fortune 500 computer services firm with more than 100 sites that saw an ROI of more than 300% in one year. Or the banking company that saw equally amazing results in just three months (“Users are not afraid of printing anymore,” they said). Or the large enterprise construction company that saw an ROI of over 400% in six months, owing to a 70% drop in three crucial areas: time spent on print management, print-related service desk calls and printer downtime.

Even the organizations that saw a modest ROI (by comparison, of course) did so in record time. One Fortune 500 energy and utilities company experienced more than 100% ROI in under six months. A small business providing financial services also saw an ROI of more than 100% after implementing PrinterLogic printer management software. Believe it or not, that took less than three months.

So when you take a closer look, not only at the time in which these organizations realized ROI, but also at the percentage of ROI that was achieved, the real question is: Can your organization afford not to eliminate print servers by installing PrinterLogic as your enterprise printer management solution?

Posted by Kyle Yardley

Another great week in Las Vegas. The lights were bright and the excitement was high as we sponsored Interop 2015 at the beautiful Mandalay Bay Convention center.

We were there to showcase our enterprise printer management solution. It never ceases to amaze me how excited people get when we tell them they can eliminate their print servers. Disbelief quickly turns into excitement when I tell them we also enable centrally managed direct IP printing and empower end users to install their own printers.

Our Release Printing module was also a big hit. It provides server-less and secure pull printing that allows users to print from any device to any network printer. Because they have to be physically at the printer, organizations get the added benefit of increased security and reduced waste of print consumables. We also featured our Mobile Printing solution, which will be announced next month. Don’t want to give too much away, but we’ll be offering a very simple way for IT to enable mobile, BYOD users and guests to print, and it won’t matter if they are on or off network.

Also, who knew that you can actually eliminate those Windows 2003 print servers instead of migrating to new print servers? As we know that the end of support is coming up July 14th 2015, we need to hurry and find a solution that can solve this. Look no further! Don’t Migrate. Eliminate Your Print Servers.

If you haven’t already, let us give you a demo so you can see for yourself how we are working with customers to eliminate print servers, empower IT and staff, cut costs and enhance print management.

Interop is a leading independent technology conference and expo designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world’s IT community. It featured new programs, networking opportunities and classes that help organizations’ IT action plans.

Posted by Andrew Miller

As you might have read in our earlier posts (see Are We Too Big to Eliminate Print Servers?, Eliminating Print Servers in Distributed Offices, and Eliminating Print Servers in Less Than 5 Days), eliminating print servers can benefit your enterprise printing environment in both obvious and unexpected ways—like rapid deployment, vastly simplified multi-site printer management, easy automation and granular auditing.

But we realize that the idea of investing in a new enterprise printer management solution can be daunting. How can you justify the migration to a new system when your existing one, however flawed and expensive to maintain, is so deeply embedded in your IT infrastructure? Do the claims about PrinterLogic printer management software’s ROI really stand up in real-world implementation? And how long do you have to wait to see this fabled ROI?

According to a recent TechValidate survey of hundreds of PrinterLogic customers, half saw ROI in less than six months, with almost 20% seeing ROI in less than three months and 75% of these enterprises broke even or saw ROI in less than one year. A mere 9% took 18 months or more to see ROI.

What’s more, it’s not as if you see ROI and then it ends. The efficiencies of PrinterLogic continue to pay off in the long term because those efficiencies are an integral part of the solution. They keep generating cost savings indefinitely. The reduced number of calls to the service desk, the ability to save on consumables, the one-click driver updates, the lack of upfront hardware costs—all those things continue as long as you continue using PrinterLogic as your enterprise printer management solution.

One of the biggest contributors to this rapid ROI is the speed with which PrinterLogic can be deployed across an entire organization. And that goes for small organizations as well as large ones. For example, one Fortune 500 insurance company with more than 1,000 printers saw ROI of more than 200% after just six months—and part of that was because they were able to fully install PrinterLogic as their enterprise printer management solution within just ten days. A smaller K-12 school district realized ROI of more than 100% in less than three months. It took them just one day to install PrinterLogic.

As for that tiny fraction of companies that took 18 months to see ROI? Well, one of them was a security-conscious federal government agency with more than 5,000 network printers, over 100 sites, and more than 100 print servers. And you can be sure the payback was worth that relatively short wait. They saw ROI of more than 400% after that time, thanks in part to a 50% drop in consumables and a 70% reduction in service desk calls.

In the next blog post on this topic, we’ll look at a breakdown of the percentage of ROI organizations experienced by eliminating print servers and using PrinterLogic as their enterprise printer management solution.

Posted by Andrew Miller

Let me guess—even though your complicated printer environment is the source of constant headaches, the thought of deploying a new solution enterprise-wide sounds even more painful.

But what if I told you that a recent TechValidate survey of PrinterLogic’s customer base revealed that 68% of our customers were able to fully deploy our solution in under five days? And that a whopping 90% of them were able to deploy in under 20 days?

Taking into consideration the size of our clients’ organizations (see Are We Too Big to Eliminate Print Servers? and Eliminating Print Servers in Distributed Offices), this might seem like a monumental feat. But with PrinterLogic’s enterprise printer management solution, rapid deployment is just business as usual.

How so? Let’s start with the install itself.

During the initial setup process, PrinterLogic automatically installs the IIS role, PrinterLogic web application, and database on Windows Server 2008 R2 (or newer) at your organization’s data center or HQ. After that, all your existing printer drivers, port settings, device settings, and preferences are copied from your print servers into PrinterLogic—with zero changes. Finally, you’ll deploy the tiny (3MB) PrinterLogic client silently to all workstations. This takes care of the hard work, automatically and seamlessly converting existing printers on print servers to direct-IP printers that print directly to the physical printer.

Oh, and I should probably mention that all your printer settings—like defaults and paper tray preferences—will carry over automatically. All those hours you’ve invested in customization won’t be wasted.

Then comes the truly rewarding part: Unplug your print servers across your organization and carry on printing just like before. Only now you’ll notice that the folks on the service desk suddenly have a lot more time on their hands.

With such straightforward steps, it’s no wonder that more than two-thirds of our customers are able to eliminate print servers altogether and migrate to PrinterLogic in under five days—or that 20% of them can get it done in just one!

But rapid deployment doesn’t stop after you’ve managed to get PrinterLogic up and running in record time. In day-to-day operations, PrinterLogic allows you to dynamically deploy printers by OU membership, container, computer, user, AD group or IP address range—and without cumbersome GPOs or scripts. And the automation is discreet: printer installation happens after logon, which avoids slow logon processes. You can even have nearby printers automatically installed through proximity printing. Support for virtual technologies like Citrix and VMware goes without saying.

And that, we think, is the great thing about PrinterLogic. The remarkable speed and ease of enterprise-wide deployment in as little as one business day isn’t a fleeting pleasure. It’s more like a blissful prelude of everything to come.

Posted by Andrew Miller

One of the huge advantages of implementing PrinterLogic is the way it streamlines and centralizes distributed print environments. Over the past ten years, PrinterLogic has helped more than 1,500 enterprise clients in a variety of fields do just that.

As a matter of fact, multi-site applications are where our enterprise printer management solution excels. A recent TechValidate survey of our customer base revealed that a massive 93% of our customers have more than one office or geographic site. Of that group, nearly half have more than 25 sites, and more than 20% have over 100 sites. When traditional print servers are in place, each one of those additional sites adds an extra—and in our opinion, unnecessary—layer of cost and complexity.

By using PrinterLogic to eliminate print servers
in your distributed print environment, you and your organization stand to benefit in three important ways.

• Get rid of upfront hardware costs: Print servers cost money. Eliminate them and that expense is eliminated too—not to mention the future costs of support and upgrades. When it comes to diverse workstations and the printers themselves, PrinterLogic overcomes many of the limitations of traditional print server architectures. That means you’re not stuck with particular drivers and conflict-avoidance hardware configurations, which widens the choices available to you when shopping for cost-effective IT solutions.
• Reduce printer-related service desk calls from remote offices: A user with no IT experience wants to print somewhere within your organization for the first time. That user simply clicks on an icon or a hyperlink, which launches a local portal. One more click installs the nearest printer. No exasperated calls to the service desk, no time spent on painstaking step-by-steps over the phone. Sounds like bliss, no? It’s actually an average day with PrinterLogic. It empowers your end users to handle routine tasks themselves—plus it simplifies and consolidates printer management so you can administer permissions, update drivers and keep an eye on queues system-wide via the PrinterLogic Portal before problems arise.
• Eliminate Print-related WAN traffic: Network printing eats up tons of bandwidth, especially for organizations with multiple geographic locations and a consolidated server environment. PrinterLogic retains many of the benefits of a local print server, such as local spooling. By printing directly from end-point devices, you don’t have print jobs clogging the WAN, and everything—including print times—speeds up as a result. In addition, by caching drivers at multiple sites, PrinterLogic tames the data demands of driver installation and doesn’t put a strain on sites with limited WAN connections.

While delivering all these practical benefits, PrinterLogic takes dozens or even hundreds of geographic sites and unifies them virtually through a single, seamless portal that’s as intuitive to the end user as it is robust for the IT department. That integration of deployment, installation, admin and monitoring saves time, money and manpower. And from a technological standpoint, it might even bring a greater sense of cohesion to your organization.

Ready for that performance bonus?