Posted by Jordan Pusey

At PrinterLogic, we’ve made it our mission to eliminate print servers. That’s not just because enterprise print servers pose difficulties when it comes to print server management, maintenance and migration. It’s also because print servers are exorbitantly expensive relative to their benefits, especially when you take total cost of ownership (TCO) into account. Eliminating print servers actually means eliminating those ongoing costs.

Although print servers aren’t exactly synonymous with ease of use, they aren’t usually thought of as white elephants either, mostly because received wisdom regards them as a necessary part of any enterprise print environment. In most cases, network print servers are first introduced as stopgap solutions when these print environments start to expand. Maybe it begins with one print server in a different department as the organization grows to accommodate new business. Then it’s followed by another print server at a different branch or global site. As the number of network printers increases, the number of print servers has traditionally increased along with it.

Each of these enterprise print servers represents a financial outlay in terms of both hardware and software. That much is obvious. But print server management has a cost, too, and that can often go overlooked. All the hours given over to writing complex scripts and assigning Group Policy Objects (GPOs) add up. And then there’s the aggregate number of phone calls to the service desk requesting help with installing printers or asking why a printer is suddenly unavailable. Plus the man hours invested in deploying and managing the right drivers or isolating and purging stuck jobs. Plus the days spent migrating print servers when upgrading or replacing them. Plus all the employee productivity that’s lost due to waiting on IT to install a printer, or due to print server downtime because of driver conflicts and 32-/64-bit incompatibilities. Plus the additional expense of upgrading the hardware and software every few years.

When you tally it all up, the TCO of enterprise print servers dwarfs their actual utility. And that doesn’t even account for their lack of enterprise-wide visibility and manageability, which makes each network print server like its own printing fiefdom.

Unlike print servers, PrinterLogic was designed to address the real needs of enterprise print environments: oversight, transparency, flexibility, ease of use, dependability. Whereas network print servers are implemented with a kind of clumsy modularity, PrinterLogic is truly scalable in the way it seamlessly grows along with your organization, instantly and infinitely adapting to your needs. Because of this, PrinterLogic replaces enterprise print servers outright by replicating all their functionality while addressing all their many shortcomings at the same time.

With PrinterLogic, you get:

• Centralized management: View, deploy and administer printers across the entire enterprise, even in globally distributed organizations.
• Empowered end users: Even computer novices will be able to install their own printers through PrinterLogic’s intuitive self-service portal.
• Mobile, BYOD and guest printing: The future is device mobility and diversity. PrinterLogic already makes it effortless for these next-generation users to print anywhere in the enterprise.

The added bonus is that PrinterLogic removes the total costs of print servers entirely. And you’ll never be tasked with the chore of print server management or migrating print servers again. Who can put a price on that?

The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a widespread and essential tool in any print environment, large or small. Through SNMP monitoring, you’re able to keep tabs on all the basic functions that have the potential to adversely affect the final link in the printing chain: the printer itself.

Almost all of today’s printers allow for SNMP monitoring of printer status, but not all print management solutions take advantage of this functionality and present it in a clear, consolidated fashion that gives IT admins immediate insight into everyday errors like low toner, empty paper trays or the operational state of printers across the enterprise—even (or especially) in distributed environments.

PrinterLogic excels by harnessing this vital and valuable protocol to provide SNMP monitoring of every compatible printer in your organization’s fleet. The accessible, at-a-glance console displays SNMP print notifications such as:

• Paper low or empty
• Low ink or toner
• Ping status
• Tray open
• Operational state
• Uptime
• Lifetime page count

Such easy and effective SNMP monitoring through PrinterLogic has obvious practical benefits. Because it shows SNMP printer status in one convenient overview, you can quickly spot the online status of printers individually or in aggregate throughout the entire organization. Statistics like page counts and total uptime can alert you to which devices might be nearing the end of their lifetimes, allowing you to plan and budget for future replacement. And by capturing SNMP notifications like low ink, empty paper empty or open trays, you can troubleshoot common usage problems as they happen. Leveraging SNMP to monitor printer status remotely in PrinterLogic could be the difference between solving a problem proactively or being bombarded with dozens of phone calls to the service desk from end users who find themselves unable to print.

At PrinterLogic, we also know how important security is to your organization. That’s why we make the security of our print management software one of our top priorities. As PrinterLogic uses native SNMP print management mechanisms to field status reports from the SNMP agents, there are no hacks or add-ons that risk the possibility of introducing unwanted SNMP printer vulnerability.

The utility and ubiquity of SNMP make it a feature you shouldn’t let go to waste by opting for a lesser print management solution that doesn’t allow for robust, enterprise-wise SNMP monitoring. By using PrinterLogic’s incredible centralized administration in conjunction with SNMP to monitor printer status, you can easily stay on top of all aspects of your print environment—from initial deployment all the way to day-to-day operation.

Posted by Jordan Pusey

Your Wide Area Network (WAN) represents the critical link to many of the business critical applications in your infrastructure. You need it to be reliable, fast and secure which makes it expensive. Then why clog it up with printing traffic? Many applications and printer drivers take what looks like a small and compressed document and bloats it into a rendered print file. If your print servers are setup to use the WAN when sending documents to the printer, you could be clogging the network, giving you sluggish performance. Let’s compare WAN printing to spelunking.

Years ago my friends and I decided to go cave exploring. We decided on a seemingly innocuous cave called Nutty Putty cave somewhere in central Utah. When I think of caves, I think of large openings in the mountain side and bats. This cave was in the middle of a field and was simply a hole in the ground. You dropped into the tight hole, turned around, and crawled on your stomach for about 20 feet until you came to a wide cavern. Then exploring the rest of the cave was finding the small openings, squeezing through and coming out into other wide caverns. This went for literally miles. At one turn I thought we could squeeze through. Somehow I got stuck. Not only was there panic in my mind, but I was also blocking all the people behind me wanting to get through. Fortunately I was able to get free, but delayed an entire party of spelunkers. (I got out, unlike this unfortunate person that caused the cave to be sealed and a movie to be created).

To keep your WAN traffic moving, unlike my cave exploring experience, some sort of printer network traffic optimization is needed. But what exactly? In geographically distributed organizations with a consolidated server environment, it can be tough to achieve the necessary optimization. Printing over WAN—and the bandwidth it gobbles up—usually goes with the territory. This is because files have to cross the WAN several times before finally being relayed by the central server to the destination printer—a device that frequently sits not more than a few feet from the endpoint device that initiated the print job!

With PrinterLogic, it’s possible for you to enjoy the advantages of multiple sites while consolidating your print environment and optimizing your printer network traffic. Unlike inferior print management solutions, PrinterLogic does the following to reduce or even eliminate print-related WAN traffic:

• Integrates with WAN caching technologies: Downloading printer drivers to workstations has the potential to consume inordinate amounts of bandwidth. PrinterLogic obviates the need for cross-WAN downloading by caching drivers locally, which also speeds up download times.
• Prints directly from endpoint devices to printers: The shortest route between two points is a straight line. PrinterLogic effectively creates a straight line between workstations and printers by directly relaying print jobs from one device to the other. This way, print jobs do not cross the WAN repeatedly and squander precious bandwidth.
• Compresses print jobs: In Citrix environments, PrinterLogic is able to reduce the size of print jobs through intelligent compression technology. Smaller files place less strain on the network.

Features like these enable you to free up WAN bandwidth for other applications, accelerate print times, and reduce the print-related congestion that can result in frustratingly slow network performance throughout the organization. Furthermore, it’s not only WAN printing that is optimized. Your entire print environment benefits from streamlining through:

• Centralized management: Deploy and administer printers individually or en masse from a single pane of glass. PrinterLogic’s web-based admin interface gives you intuitive yet fine-grained control over network printers across the enterprise.
• Simplified end-user installation: Empower your end-users—including roaming employees—to install printers by themselves with a single click by means of a uniform, consistent self-service portal, saving hours spent dealing with print-related service desk calls. Optional floorplan maps allow employees to view and identify nearby printers wherever they happen to be.
• Oversight and flexibility: Integrated auditing and mobile printing modules provide detailed macro- and micro-level insight into printer usage while meeting the cutting-edge demands of the modern workplace.

PrinterLogic is a powerful, cost-effective print management solution that also serves as printer network traffic optimization software. It will make printing over WAN more efficient on the way to improving your entire print environment. Contact us today to find out how we can help reduce your WAN printing costs.

Posted by Devin Anderson

We often think about effective print management in terms of increases. Increasing the speed of printer deployment. Increasing the number of end-users who can install their own printers. Increasing the availability of the print environment. Increasing the level of automation. Increasing the efficiency of driver management. And so, in pursuit of increases like these, many organizations look to implement network print management software that will help achieve them.

Increases are no doubt desirable, but it’s also important to recognize the value of reduction. Reducing the amount of time spent on print management, reducing network print traffic, or reducing the usage of consumables can have just as much impact on the performance of a print environment—and ultimately your organization’s bottom line.

PrinterLogic treats increase and reduction as two sides of the print management coin. For example, as the speed of printer deployment rises, the time required for that aspect of print management falls. The less complicated end-user printer installation is, the more people will want and be able to make use of it. The greater the uptime, the fewer hours lost waiting for stuck print jobs to be purged and printing to resume.

With that in mind, PrinterLogic’s network print management software incorporates features that are designed to bring complementary increases and reductions in all the right areas, which translates to significant cost savings in both the short- and long-term. The single largest area of impact is through the wholesale elimination of print servers. By eliminating print servers, you also eliminate the associated costs of acquisition, maintenance, upgrade and replacement—costs that can frequently take the form of time invested in print management or lost to downtime.

As is typical of PrinterLogic, this elimination of expensive hardware and finicky, unreliable software actually comes with a gain in functionality. With PrinterLogic installed, your organization now enjoys:

• Convenient centralized management: The consistent web-based management interface allows you to deploy and administer printers from a single terminal anywhere in the organization.
• Printer network traffic optimization: Intelligent WAN caching technologies and direct endpoint-to-printer printing minimize network print traffic and alleviate the congestion common to print server and virtual environments.
• Simple self-service installation: End-users have access to a uniform, web-based portal where they can locate, identify and install nearby printers with a single click—even when using Citrix or VMware.
• Powerful integrated modules: PrinterLogic’s modules for pull printing, mobile printing and auditing give you unparalleled control over your print environment while better adapting it to the needs and habits of today’s end-users.

Thanks to benefits like these (plus so many more), the costs of network print management are reduced as a matter of course. Users no longer have to waste time calling the service desk with routine printer installation queries. Mobile and BYOD users can print effortlessly without you having to invest in next-generation printers or limited proprietary solutions like Google Cloud Print. Admins don’t have to spend hours customizing scripts or group policy objects (GPOs) to deploy printers automatically and correctly. Network print traffic doesn’t slow productivity.

So how do you reduce the costs of network print management? The answer is simple: PrinterLogic’s network print management software. Contact us today for a 30 day free trial or demo to learn more.

Posted by Devin Anderson

As enterprise printing begins to transition away from a decades-long reliance on print servers and all their associated demands, centralized printer management has grown in popularity and importance. Like any trend, though, it’s one that should be scrutinized carefully before jumping in with both feet. What exactly are the supposed benefits of centralized printer management software, and does it fulfill them in real-world scenarios?

At PrinterLogic, our approach to centralized print management is simple. It’s about visibility, control and ease of use. That’s why we designed a print management solution that gives you a single, intuitively clear window onto your entire enterprise print environment and places all available options right at your fingertips. This means you can:

• Create, edit and remove printers individually or in bulk: Even if the printers in question are half a world away, you can deploy and amend them through a common web-based admin page. What’s more, there’s no unusual labyrinthine management protocol to decipher. PrinterLogic’s printer management paradigm is as easy to grasp as expanding or collapsing device trees and clicking check boxes—yet it’s more full-featured and powerful than conventional print management solutions.
• Initiate dynamic deployments: Regardless of your preferred criteria—Active Directory user, group, container, hostname, IP range and more—PrinterLogic allows you to deploy printers to select users with the confidence of granular control but all the convenience of reliable automation. Here, too, centralized print management allows you to do this even in the most geographically distributed print environments. Just as amazingly, it does this without the need for troublesome scripts and group policy objects (GPOs)!
• Monitor and manage printer queues: Unlike print servers, PrinterLogic’s approach to print management is unified rather than fragmented. A stuck print job on a workstation anywhere in your organization can be purged from one central location.
• Audit the entire print environment: Who printed a 500-page single-sided document in color at 8pm last night? Which department is using disproportionate amounts of paper and toner? How do the organization’s printing habits this month measure up year on year? Centralized print management through PrinterLogic lets you answer questions like these thanks to handy macro- and micro-level auditing tools.
• Administer effectively and efficiently: Update drivers, change profile settings, launch custom configurations—in short, perform any and every kind of maintenance or modification involved in enterprise printing—throughout your print environment without having to leave your seat.

But it isn’t just the admin or service desk representative who benefits from the power and transparency of centralized print management. The end-user experiences advantages too. PrinterLogic’s printer management software empowers your end-users with a standard self-service installation portal that enables them to identify and install nearby printers—even in virtual environments like Citrix and VMware. With ordinary employees now able to play a small but effective role in print management, they experience the speed and satisfaction of addressing their own needs while reducing some of the chronic burden on IT.

So, as you can see, centralized print management is a trend worth following because it has the potential to bring all the above benefits. But it’s only through PrinterLogic that you can be sure of unlocking that potential in full. Contact us today for a demonstration or 30 day free trial to see these benefits for yourself.

Posted by Andrew Miller

Printing from mobile devices is never the cakewalk it’s supposed to be. It can be hard enough just on a tiny home network, let alone in a large-scale enterprise print environment. As a result, the question for IT departments who are seeking to implement enterprise mobile printing becomes: How can I allow my employees to print from a mobile device in a way that’s reliable, simple and secure?

Many mobile printing solutions promise to deliver on all these counts, but they don’t measure up in reality. That’s usually because they try to introduce mobile printing capabilities through a specific, rather than a holistic, approach. Which is to say, they might enable mobile printing, but not necessarily in a way that suits your print environment, or your users’ behavior. That invariably leads to complications and frustration—the very opposite of what your guests and employees should experience when printing from a mobile device.

With PrinterLogic’s enterprise Mobile Printing solution, your mobile, BYOD and guest users enjoy effortless mobile printing that’s as easy as tapping the “Share” button or sending an email. Because that’s all it takes to print from a mobile device once you’ve implemented it!

This works great for mobile employees who are equipped with company-issued mobile devices. There’s absolutely no extra software to install: no drivers, apps or custom OS tweaks. When they select a file and tap the “Share” button on their device, they can then choose a nearby PrinterLogic network printer as their print option. The print job will be sent directly to the print queue. It doesn’t matter where in the enterprise print environment these mobile users happen to be located, or if they’re running Android, iOS or some other mobile-optimized OS. Using PrinterLogic, mobile printing is almost easier than printing from a workstation, resulting in far fewer frantic calls to the service desk asking for help printing from a mobile device.

Guests and BYOD users have it just as easy, but in this case PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing solution relies on proven email-to-print technology. Instead of tapping the “Share” button and selecting a PrinterLogic printer, users simply email their chosen file to the networked printer’s dedicated address. This is a huge benefit to freelancers, consultants and temporary employees, who no longer have to install drivers or try to connect to network printers and hope they have access rights. It’s also a huge benefit to IT, since you no longer have to fret over device compatibility. If a user’s device can email, it can print.

Enterprise mobile printing needs to be secure, too, and that’s another strong point for PrinterLogic. When you use our Mobile Printing solution, you and your fellow admins have full say over printer access, quotas and capabilities. If you don’t want certain guests to be able to print PDFs on a particular printer, or if guests are only authorized to print in black and white, you can configure that combination precisely. What’s more, with PrinterLogic, mobile and guest printing is subject to the same auditing oversight as any job initiated from a workstation.

PrinterLogic is changing the way enterprises like yours view mobile printing. It’s never been easier to allow your employees to print from mobile devices—and chances are that it will transform more than just your print environment for the better. To learn more contact us today for a demonstration or free 30 day trial.