Posted by Devin Anderson

Ever had a lucky break? It probably came down to being in the right place at the right time.

On that basis, printing in VMware View can sometimes seem like a matter of luck. But that’s clearly not how it ought to be. With VMware location-based printing, every user should get the right printer deployed in the right place at the right time—every time.

PrinterLogic takes the element of chance out of VMware View printing by reliably deploying nearby printers to the correct users based on specific criteria that you set, including:

• Active Directory (AD) user, group or organizational unit (OU)
• End users’ proximity to certain printers
• Hardware identifiers (e.g., MAC addresses, endpoint hostnames)

With these criteria in hand, PrinterLogic then automatically determines who your VMware users are, where they are physically located, and delivers the predetermined printers and drivers to them. That enables VMware View virtual printing to become much more seamless, intentional and consistent. And that reliable precision is the same for when users roam within a VMware session. As the user moves between floors, departments or buildings, PrinterLogic will dynamically remove previous printers and provision new ones that are physically located near the end user, so that VMware location-based printing is as easy for IT as it is for your employees.

Because PrinterLogic is built on a proven direct-IP printing foundation, it enhances and simplifies VMware View printing—and can even replace native virtual printing in VMware View outright. PrinterLogic also has the ability to relay print jobs directly to endpoint devices, eliminating the customarily heavy WAN traffic that can negatively impact network performance across the enterprise. Along with PrinterLogic’s intuitive driver management for endpoint devices and efficient centralized administration, it addresses some the biggest shortcomings of VMware virtual printing to make it smoother than ever.

Should you choose to make PrinterLogic responsible for all the heavy lifting in VMware View printing,

Posted by Andrew Miller

You operate with a sharp eye on your bottom line. As well you should. It’s an essential consideration for any business, regardless of your size, scope or sector. That focus on the budget naturally affects how you think about many integral areas of your organization, including corporate printing—and more specifically, corporate printer management.

But here’s something you might not have considered: There are massive cost savings just waiting to be had in nearly all corporate print environments. Most organizations—understandably wary of jeopardizing their bottom line by investing in expensive, non-essential infrastructure—tend to make do with conventional print management solutions. Sure, those solutions have plenty of drawbacks, but at least their frustration and inefficiency are predictable. Or so the rationale goes.

What organizations like these don’t realize is that the status quo is losing them money every single day. Corporate printer management as implemented through PrinterLogic has been proven time and time again to decrease costs and increase return on investment (ROI) significantly—not as a one-time or short-term benefit, either, but indefinitely. That’s because PrinterLogic is a holistic corporate printing solution that increases efficiency and enhances productivity throughout your entire print environment.

Let’s look at some of the ways that implementing

PrinterLogic

as your organization’s print management solution can cut costs now and in the long term:

• In-depth auditing tools. This feature allows you to address one of the “hidden” threats to your bottom line: usage of print consumables (e.g., toner, paper). By keeping track of print-related activity according to job, user and printer and other advanced data points, you can monitor which users or departments are the most resource-hungry and take steps to curb overuse.
  
  Independent surveys
  
  have shown PrinterLogic to be incredibly effective in reducing consumable usage organization-wide—sometimes by 70% or more.
• 
  Centralized management. PrinterLogic lets you oversee and administer your entire print environment from a single pane of glass. That means you can remotely manage printers, drivers and print queues with ease, saving IT staff from having to make onsite visits to distributed locations just to carry out day-to-day duties. PrinterLogic’s renowned efficiency and built-in automation also means that admins spend less time dealing with routine deployment, driver issues, and installation, so they’re free to concentrate on other tasks.
• End-user empowerment. PrinterLogic’s self-service portal is one of its most highly praised features, because it conveniently puts common printer installation in the hands of end users. Its simplicity takes the guesswork out of the installation process, enabling end users to access nearby printers on demand from anywhere in the organization, and likewise lifting one of the most frequent burdens on support staff.
• 
  Print server elimination. Although they’re meant to help with corporate printing, print servers can be huge time and cost drains on your organization. Their complexity, unreliability and incompatibility are legendary. And they’re expensive to install, maintain, upgrade and replace. PrinterLogic not only duplicates print server functionality (without the hardware costs), it also provides your organization with additional native features and the flexibility to scale your print environment further.

When it comes to decreasing costs and increasing ROI, corporate print management is an area of vast untapped potential for most organizations—even those that already have a direct IP printer management solution.

PrinterLogic

is the tool that helps you unlock those savings for an immediate and ongoing boost to your bottom line.

Mobile devices have become indispensable to the way we work and play. This has become increasingly evident in the world of enterprise printing, where the widespread adoption of mobile devices has led to vast numbers of employees and guest users wanting to print to network printers using their BYOD or company-issued Android smartphones and tablets. For already overtaxed IT departments, however, setting up and supporting Android network printing for these users can seem overwhelming.

Actually, Android network printing isn’t challenging at all—provided you have the right tools. And PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing solution is just that. It allows any Android device to print to any authorized printer in a way that’s easy and transparent for the user and requires absolutely zero device-specific setup for IT.

PrinterLogic doesn’t rely on workarounds or hacks, nor does it use Google Cloud Print printers or other proprietary solutions to achieve this kind of functionality. Its Mobile Printing solution leverages proven email-to-print capabilities to enable printing from any Android device to any network printer. If that device is capable of sending email, it can print, regardless of file type. That flexibility applies to endpoint devices as well. Any networked printer—including legacy hardware—can receive those jobs and print them just as if they had been initiated from a workstation. Likewise, Android print jobs are subject to PrinterLogic’s comprehensive auditing oversight.

To enable printing from an Android smartphone or tablet to a network printer using Mobile Printing, all you have to do is assign a printer a discrete email address in PrinterLogic’s intuitive, centralized admin console. Android users can then simply email documents to that printer, where the job will immediately be printed. That experience is even more straightforward and reliable than dedicated Android cloud printing solutions.

Typically, any solution that promises such unprecedented ease of use involves hidden tradeoffs. PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing provides this incredible network printing simplicity for Android clients without compromise. So in addition to effortless Android network printing, your organization’s print environment benefits from:

• Enterprise-grade security: As accessible as Mobile Printing is, you still determine which users can print and to which printers.
• Granular control: With Mobile Printing, you can set quotas for how much Android users can print, deauthorize certain file types, limit printing exclusively to black and white, and more.
• Total flexibility: Because Mobile Printing doesn’t have any hardware-dependent requirements, you can print with the latest Android devices alongside legacy printers. And to retain functionality when upgrading your network printers, you’re not beholden to any single printer manufacturer.
• Printer-specific release: Mobile Printing allows Android users to release a print job to a specific printer from their mobile device.

With PrinterLogic, printing from Android devices to network printers is as easy as it gets. Your organization’s Android users will certainly appreciate the simplicity, as will your IT support staff. Contact us today for a free trial or demo of our software and see for yourself how easy Android printing is with PrinterLogic.

Posted by Devin Anderson

In traditional enterprise print environments, there are common printer driver management problems that admins encounter on a regular basis. These include but are by no means limited to:

• Improper 32- and 64-bit deployment
• Incorrect printer driver configuration
• Printer driver incompatibility with the workstation OS
• Printer driver incompatibility with the endpoint device

Troubleshooting these problems can be time-consuming and frustrating for end users as well as IT support staff because it’s often difficult to pinpoint the root cause. Effective printer driver management can go a long way toward avoiding these issues, but most print management solutions don’t offer anything close to it. If anything, they end up complicating printer driver management. And that only intensifies for print servers.

PrinterLogic breaks the mold by being a print management solution that natively offers effortless management of print drivers. Just as you can configure, deploy and administer network printers from one centralized console, so too can you use PrinterLogic to configure, deploy and update printer drivers in the same way. PrinterLogic allows you to maintain a single printer driver repository that you can use to consistently deliver the right driver to every printer in your organization—all while keeping WAN traffic to a minimum.

Not only does PrinterLogic reliably work with all custom and manufacturer printer drivers, it also provides its own universal driver for fail-safe printing. Its built-in multi-platform support for Windows, Mac and Linux end-user workstations ensures full-featured, dependable printing even in mixed-OS environments. Plus you can have 32- and 64-bit drivers so that those platforms can exist side by side without worrying about the wrong one being installed.

Managing printer drivers gets even easier with PrinterLogic’s ability to manage driver profiles. By using the intuitive admin console from anywhere in your organization, you can configure driver settings such as DPI, duplexing, paper size, paper source and color or black-and-white printing. And, better still, you can apply those driver settings to individual workstations or make batch edits for whole departments. PrinterLogic also gives you access to the actual driver interface, allowing you to configure advanced settings to customize every printer function. After the first install, you can choose to reapply the driver profile configuration every time a user logs on or even after each print job.

Updating drivers has always been a headache. But that’s no longer the case when you implement PrinterLogic as your printer driver management solution. Thanks to its seamless integration into any print environment and powerful management capabilities, it’s easy to update drivers selectively or enterprise-wide, so you have the ability to equip your entire organization with the latest printer software bug-fixes, compatibility and functionality. You can even push the updates out to printers on end-user workstations automatically.

The icing on the cake? PrinterLogic’s printer driver management is just as effective in virtual environments like Citrix and VMware. Your IT staff will no longer have to deal with “ghost” drivers as well as other issues and incompatibilities that can plague virtual sessions.

There are plenty of common printer driver management problems, but thankfully, there’s one powerful solution: PrinterLogic. Contact us today for a demonstration of the software and see for yourself how we can solve your printer driver problems.

Posted by Devin Anderson

When you’re thinking about making the shift to 64-bit printing from a 32-bit print environment, you need one that’s going to be future-proof. And, ideally, one that will also bring additional improvements above and beyond the performance bump from 32- to 64-bit printers and drivers.

That’s why you should consider upgrading to PrinterLogic instead of migrating to a different version of the same printing solution. Whether you’re dealing with 32- or 64-bit printing, print servers will still have the same fundamental shortcomings:

• Lack of visibility into printer status and usage
• Fragmented management of printers, drivers and queues
• Unpredictable availability and single points of failure
• High costs of maintenance, upgrade and replacement
• Incompatibilities with third-party solutions and custom configurations

By eliminating your organization’s dependency on print servers altogether, PrinterLogic neatly avoids all these common problems while making migration to a better print environment far easier than you ever thought possible.

You see, among other things, Microsoft’s server migration tool requires you to manually assign 32-bit and 64-bit drivers to specific printers, and that’s the case even if there are hundreds of printers in your organization. Even if you’re willing to take on that daunting task, at the end of the day you’ll still be stuck with print servers and all their drawbacks after a time-consuming and complicated migration process.

PrinterLogic, on the other hand, smoothly copies over all your existing printers and drivers into one location and allows you to manage them with just a few clicks. Then it’s goodbye, print servers.

With PrinterLogic, there’s no confusion between 32- and 64-bit printers and the resulting driver incompatibilities. You can automatically implement whichever driver you choose on a per-user or -workstation basis, or you can use PrinterLogic’s universal print driver for even greater ease of use. There’s no need for hacks and workarounds, no crossing your fingers and hoping that the right driver is selected by default. It’s as seamless as you can get.

Better still, from that point onward, PrinterLogic lets you manage 64-bit printers, drivers and even existing queues cleanly and efficiently from a single pane of glass. A centralized driver repository means that instead of sorting through tangle of drivers and corresponding printers one by one, you can assign, deploy and install printers remotely and en masse according to customizable criteria that you set.

It even works beautifully with virtual environments like VMware and Citrix, which can add another layer of complexity (and potential 32-/64-bit driver compatibility issues) to print environments that still rely on print servers. Using PrinterLogic, virtual users consistently get the right printer and the right driver in the right location at the right time.

All that ease of management—and yet it calls for less server infrastructure, fewer moving parts, and reduced investment of time and manpower.

Posted by Andrew Miller

Many PrinterLogic customers tell us that they initially decided to implement our print management solution to simplify and consolidate their enterprise print environment. They wanted advantages like more efficient printer, driver, and queue management, increased uptime, an improved end-user printer installation experience, plus seamless integration with virtual environments like Citrix and VMware. At the same time, they were pleasantly surprised to find that PrinterLogic was a great way to reduce enterprise print costs.

The reason for that is because PrinterLogic was designed with holistic, enterprise-wide efficiency in mind. It doesn’t reduce print costs as a temporary, one-time benefit—it does so over the long-term, which means that the cost savings your organization experiences after installing PrinterLogic are often savings that continue indefinitely.

So just how is PrinterLogic so effective at reducing printing costs for organizations of all sizes across every sector, whether it be education, finance, heavy industry, government, healthcare or beyond?

• By eliminating print servers. PrinterLogic allows you to duplicate all the functionality you derive from print servers while introducing additional leading-edge features like Mobile Printing. This reduces hardware infrastructure dramatically—along with the reducing the ongoing costs of maintaining, upgrading and replacing print servers.
• By providing powerful auditing tools. This way you can monitor printer and consumable (e.g., toner, paper) usage at an unprecedented level of detail. Based on survey results from an independent research firm, our customers frequently see reductions in consumables of 70%—or more. With a greater awareness of the “invisible” costs of consumables, several organizations have even witnessed a permanent cultural shift toward reduced consumption after installing PrinterLogic.
• By saving time. Thanks to PrinterLogic’s built-in automation capabilities and effortless centralized management of printers, drivers and print queues throughout the entire enterprise, the IT staff no longer has to devote as much time to basic oversight and administration of the print environment. That frees them up to focus on different responsibilities, potentially reducing costs along other areas of your organization’s IT backbone.
• By empowering end users. Too many print management solutions devalue end users by forcing them to be the weakest links in the print environment chain. PrinterLogic takes the opposite approach. Our self-service installation portal puts routine printer installation in the hands of the users themselves, so they can easily and reliably access the printers they need without having to call the service desk. That increases their productivity while also lightening the burden on IT. Every one of our customers cites this as one of their top-ranked PrinterLogic features.
• By staying ahead of the curve. As enterprise priorities change with the times, PrinterLogic allows you to remain on the cutting edge without having to make repeated massive investments on third-party solutions that require long installations or testing phases. For example, our Mobile Printing and Pull Printing solutions work smoothly and seamlessly with any kind of print environment, even legacy hardware or BYOD users.

As a result, PrinterLogic gets right to the heart of the issues that drive up enterprise printing costs. It cuts waste of print consumables, reduces the costs of purchasing, deploying and maintaining servers and endpoint devices, boosts the productivity of IT staff as well as end users, and keeps your organization responsive to the newest trends in business technology. Who would have thought that one solution to reduce printing costs could be so far-reaching?