Posted by Devin Anderson

Does your organization ever use freelancers? How about contractors? Consultants? Do any outside executives or visiting partners ever turn up?

These all fall under the label of “guests,” and much like anyone else, quite often they need to print. The problem up to now has been that setting up guest printing just isn’t very easy. In many cases guest printing requires a suitable device running a compatible operating system and the inconvenient process of a full printer installation—and even if all those criteria are met, there can be connection problems, driver incompatibilities, limited auditing, and security issues.

PrinterLogic’s new Mobile Printing solution clears all the hurdles of guest printing in one fell swoop. With Mobile Printing, guests can quickly and easily print from any device to any printer in your organization no matter where they happen to be. There’s absolutely no need for print servers, driver installs, or device compatibility with iOS or Google Cloud Print.

Using straightforward email-to-print functionality, PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing solution allows guests—as well as mobile and BYOD employees—to easily print from whatever device they happen to be using, even if they’re outside of the network. All these users have to do is walk up to a printer, enter its dedicated email address, and simply email documents to that printer. The jobs then enter the queue just like any other job initiated from a workstation.

This solution is as much a relief for the guest as it is for IT. That’s because, in addition to simplifying the actual printing process for guests, Mobile Printing reduces end-user reliance on IT while keeping powerful authorization checks in place. For example:

• Security: You decide who can print, what they can print, and to which printers. PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing is proof that simplicity and security don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
• Control: You’re able to set quotas for how much guests can print, the file types they can print, limit printing to black and white only, and more. Not only does this provide further security, it also caps the potential costs of guest printing.
• Compatibility: You can use PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing solution to make your printing environment compatible with the most cutting-edge devices without the need to replace your existing printers.

With PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing solution, guest printing goes from being a major inconvenience to an almost invisible part of your enterprise print environment.

Posted by Jarrett Taylor

Today nearly half of the workforce identifies as “mobile,” meaning they work from more than one corporate office. We all know that printer installation and management can be a headache even for employees who primarily stay in one office—but for mobile employees, the challenges are exponential. At each new office they visit they need to contact IT in order to print, which is frustrating to both the employee and the IT help desk alike.

There’s also the issue of enabling simple, secure printing for BYOD users and guests. You need to enable all employees to easily print from both corporate-owned devices and their personal devices. And you need your contractors, partners and guests to be able to easily and securely print from whichever office they happen to be working from, too. But you also need to retain the ability to control what and how each of these parties print.

Here at PrinterLogic, our mantra has always been to Eliminate Print Servers. And while at first that may seem like a statement that would only matter to IT pros, I’m here to tell you about the myriad of benefits that Eliminating Print Servers has for the end user, too. And today, we’ll be focusing on our newest product, which dramatically simplifies life for your mobile employees, as well as BYOD and guest printing situations.

To help solve the printing problems of your mobile workers, BYOD and guests, today we introduced the PrinterLogic Mobile Printing solution, which extends the capabilities of our existing printer management platform. Our Mobile Printing solution gives organizations of all sizes the ability to enable any mobile employee, contractor, partner or guest to easily print to the closest printer, without the installation of any printers or the need for print servers. With this new product, PrinterLogic has enabled enterprises to empower users to print from every device in their print environment—both personal and corporate-owned—regardless of whether they are on or off the network.

So let’s take a look at how it works.

Making Life Easier for Mobile Employees
PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing solution enables your mobile employees to print natively from their mobile devices by simply hitting the forward arrow, then print, and then selecting a PrinterLogic printer as their print option. Benefits for the mobile employee include:

• No software to install—Mobile employees no longer need to call IT for help installing the printers at each new location they visit.
• Any device—PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing solution supports all mobile devices, making mobile printing simple regardless of which device type your employees use.
• Any printer—PrinterLogic enables users to quickly and easily print from their mobile devices to any network printer, regardless of that printer’s mobile capabilities.

Making Life Easier for BYOD, Partners and Guests
BYOD users, partners and guests traditionally encounter a number of difficulties when trying to print from enterprise offices. Getting authorization to print and installing printers is often a non-starter, and is difficult for both the user and IT. PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing solution enables BYOD users, partners and guests to easily print from any device, via simple email-to-print functionality regardless of whether they are on- or off-network. These users simply walk to a printer, enter its dedicated email address, email documents to that printer where it is immediately printed.

Making Life Easier on IT
Enterprise IT departments spend a large portion of their time dealing with print-related requests that stem from challenges around BYOD & guest printing. PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing solution simplifies printing for those users, which drastically reduces the number of print-related service desk calls IT receives. In addition, PrinterLogic provides a number of added benefits for IT, including:

• Built-in security—PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing solution gives the enterprise complete control over who can print and to which printers.
• Retain control—For email print jobs, enterprises can set quotas for how much guests can print, the file types they can print, limit printing to black and white only, and more.
• Supports any printer—PrinterLogic enables mobile printing while eliminating the cost of upgrading all your printers to iOS and Google Cloud Print capable devices. All printers gain mobile printing capabilities, even legacy printers without support of native email printing.
• Printer-specific release—PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing solution gives employees the ability to automatically release a print job to a specific printer from their mobile device.

But Wait, There’s More…
In addition to solving the challenges of mobile, BYOD and guest printing, PrinterLogic’s latest release also provides enterprises with several new capabilities. This includes broader platform support, additional security features, and management tools.

• Android & Chromebook—Support for both Android and Chromebook devices enables enterprises to truly support any device in their print environment.
• Linux Client—A new Linux client enables seamless printing for thick & thin client endpoint devices while eliminating the need for costly printer mapping and management tools.
• SNMP-Based Alerts—Proactive alerts can now notify IT of printer issues so that they can fix issues before users complain, enhancing the user experience and ensuring a higher level of availability.
• Pull Printing—Pull Printing increases the security of enterprise print environments by securely storing users’ print jobs until the user releases the job at the printer. By using PrinterLogic’s Pull Printing and Mobile Printing solutions together, enterprises are empowered with secure mobile printing.

So if you’ve been looking for a way to enable simple printing for both your mobile employees, BYOD and guests—regardless of their device type and whether they are on or off network—and still want to maintain the security and control of your print environment, PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing solution may be your answer. We’d be happy to give you a demo, or set you up with a free trial of PrinterLogic’s complete platform, so that you can see if it’s right for your organization. Just get in touch with us here.

Have you ever wanted to know what your end users were printing, or how often they are printing? Or, have you ever wanted to know who or what department uses the most printer consumables?

Whether you are managing a small or large environment, the ability to audit print jobs is essential to tracking printer consumables and keeping track of who is using those consumables. End users typically don’t know how much their work and/or personal print jobs are costing the company. All they know is they have an awesome printer at work that can print all the flyers they need for their yard sale in a snap. Over time, the cost of those jobs can add up.

But before you can control these expenses, you must first be able to track them. This is why you need a print auditing solution that can show you:

• The date of the print job
• The time the print job was submitted
• Who submitted the print job
• What printer they used
• What document they printed
• How many pages it was
• If it was color or b&w
• If it used duplex
• The size of paper used
• Their AD department
• Their AD manager’s name
• The AD job title

With this information, you would have enough hard data to implement a new printing policy for charge back on jobs that are not related to work. If you already have a printing policy then you now have the ability to track what is being printed and enforce it.

With PrinterLogic’s solution you have the ability to run print job audit reports that include all of the above plus more. PrinterLogic is a powerful on-premise web application that helps eliminate print servers in your enterprise printing environment and replace them with centrally managed direct IP printers. One of the three main components of this solution is a small client that runs as a system service with admin rights on each workstation. The client has the ability to see and store print job metadata as each user prints. Within the PrinterLogic solution you can run a handful of different reports based on this metadata. These reports include:

• Overview reports that display charts, graphs and printing statistics, including:
  • Printing summary
  • By Week
  • By Hour
  • Application Usage
  • Job and Page Counts
  • Simplex/Duplex
  • Black and White vs. Color
  • Paper Size
• Audit reports that show you usage and print job accountability over a select time and date range:
  • Records (historical printing information)
  • Users (pages printed per user)
  • AD Job Title
  • AD Manager
  • AD Department
  • Printer (pages printed per printer)
  • Folder (pages printed per printer in a folder)

Once you have run a selected report you can export it to a CSV file that can be used for auditing, user charge-back, department charge-back, tracking of printer consumables and finding out which printers are being over-utilized or underutilized. If you would like to learn more about PrinterLogic’s powerful solution and how it can help you in your enterprise printing environment, reach out to our team and schedule a live demo of the software and get your hands on a free 30 day trial.

Posted by Andrew Miller

There are plenty of benefits bundled into PrinterLogic, and one of them is its adaptability. It can be deployed effectively in a whole range of enterprise print environments regardless of their size, sector or setup.

Sometimes, however, it’s helpful to take a deeper look into how PrinterLogic fares in enterprise environments specific to a particular industry. Thanks to a recent survey of PrinterLogic customers conducted by the independent research firm TechValidate, we’ve been able to examine the experiences of our health-care customers once they’ve installed our enterprise print management software. And the results are persuasive.

For an incredible 92% of respondents in the healthcare sector, the return on investment (ROI) after implementing PrinterLogic was greater than 100% (TVID: 529-296-6DE). Wow. To think of it another way, for almost every single health-care organization that deployed PrinterLogic, the solution did more than just pay for itself—it practically earned them money.

Wait, what? How can that be?

It comes down to the aggregate cost savings that PrinterLogic is capable of achieving in a variety of areas throughout your enterprise print environment. For example, close to three-quarters of these same health-care organizations saw a reduction of 50% or greater in the time spent on print management (TVID: 0A9-080-FA7). A majority—62%, in fact—also watched their print-related service desk calls drop by half or more. As many as 23% saw a reduction in service desk calls by an astounding 90–100%!

In practical terms, that means more IT staff who are using their time at work for tasks other than troubleshooting printer deployments. They’re more productive, they’re more efficient, and they can spend more time optimizing other aspects of the IT backbone.

Speaking of productivity, just shy of one-quarter of these same respondents experienced a reduction in printer downtime by 90%–100%! Well over half (57%) saw downtime reduced by 50% or more. What does that look like on the ground? It means that employees can print exactly when they need to, enabling them to accomplish more and deliver a better customer experience.

Behind the scenes, PrinterLogic works to trim the costly accumulated fat from your print environment. Almost 40% of the survey respondents said that PrinterLogic allowed them to reduce their remote server infrastructure by 70% or more. That cost-cutting diet can often take the form of print servers, now made superfluous, or additional management solutions that PrinterLogic’s all-in-one package replaces.

And many of those efficiencies are ongoing. Almost one-quarter of those surveyed witnessed a 70–89% drop in print consumables usage. That’s like going from using ten toner cartridges per month down to three (or less). Or from 100 reams of paper down to less than 30. Now imagine those cost savings multiplied across the breadth of your entire organization, month after month. That’s how PrinterLogic helped these organizations see such amazing ROI.

What’s more, to generate those stats, they didn’t have to jump through all sorts of hoops hidden in the fine print. This is what PrinterLogic helps you achieve right out of the box.

For health-care organizations wanting to tame their print environment, the best medicine looks to be PrinterLogic.

Posted by Andrew Miller

Return on investment (ROI) can play a huge role in determining whether your organization opts for one enterprise print management solution over another. There’s a catch, though. Sometimes those predictions about ROI are rose-colored guesses that don’t necessarily correlate with real-world cost savings.

At PrinterLogic, instead of promising you a certain amount of ROI, we can simply point to actual case studies where our customers have already realized remarkable return on investment. Not by doing anything special—just through deploying our enterprise print management software in their print environment.

Take Laser Spine Institute (click here to read the full case study), a health care provider that aims to help alleviate chronic neck and back pain through minimally invasive spine surgery. Its specialty notwithstanding, in many respects the Laser Spine Institute bears strong similarities to other health care providers around the world. It has seven widely distributed locations: Cincinnati, Cleveland, Oklahoma City, Philadelphia, Scottsdale, St. Louis, and Tampa. It employs around 1,000 people. And in its effort to relieve thousands of patients each year from their chronic pain, the organization’s day-to-day operations have extremely high print demands.

Among several other attempted solutions, Laser Spine Institute’s IT team tried to implement printer policies and scripting to regain control of the 233 printers and four Windows print servers that comprised the enterprise print environment. Nothing worked.

Nothing, that is, until they deployed PrinterLogic.

Before long, the organization was able to eliminate all four of its Windows print servers—and with them the significant ongoing costs of maintenance, migration, and hardware upgrades. Earlier issues with printer driver compatibility, ports, manual printer installations, and driver updates all but vanished, thanks in large part to PrinterLogic’s powerful but intuitive centralized management. The time required for printer deployment dropped from an estimated 48 to 72 hours down to just one hour. That saved hundreds of man hours that were previously spent troubleshooting and creating workarounds.

Another former area of massive resource outlay had been in routine printer installs. For end users to do this themselves, they had to select the right printer from a huge master list. Then there were almost always unforeseen problems when they finally found the correct printer and tried to install it. That invariably led to a call to the service desk, which equated to time that both IT staff and employees were preoccupied and unproductive.

Once PrinterLogic was in use, service desk calls plummeted to “nearly zero” for routine installs. That’s because end users were able to click on an icon, visually select the nearest printer on a floor plan map, and install it instantly without any complicated additional steps.

Here’s the important part: The IT professionals at Laser Spine Institute have stated that
ROI has exceeded 200% since installing PrinterLogic. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s not a prediction. That’s actual, proven ROI in a common enterprise print environment. And there are even more potential cost savings to be realized through PrinterLogic’s built-in features like comprehensive auditing, central driver management, and more.