Posted by Jordan Pusey

Pull printing solutions are catching on in the enterprise on account of their potential for cost savings and security. You’ll often find them under different trade names, sometimes with “Follow” or “Secure” in the title, but they all adhere to the same basic principle.

So what is pull printing, then?

You’ll be glad to hear it’s as straightforward as it sounds. Pull printing is a two-step process whereby a user initiates a print job from a workstation or a mobile device and then “pulls” (or “releases”) it at a particular physical printer through either a GUI command or an authentication method of some kind.

We at PrinterLogic are all about simplicity, but we see a lot of value in this extra step when additional security is needed. We’ve heard plenty of stories about confidential documents being left in the printing tray or even taken by unauthorized employees after they’re printed. Secure pull printing avoids this security risk by ensuring that the documents are not left unattended at the printer for any period of time. The user who initiates the print job—and only that user—has full control over precisely where and when that job is executed.

Many organizations get the request from end users who need their own “in-office” printer. These requests generally come from HR, doctors, nurses, executives, and most anyone who feels they cannot use a shared printer because they must protect the information they print. IT must weigh the cost of owning these printers (cheaper initial cost but much higher cost per page, increased service desk costs, and higher management costs) with the value of larger, shared MFP printers. With Pull Printing, the decision is made easier because you get the best of both worlds, cheaper printing and security.

Another advantage of pull printing solutions is in the reduction of waste. We’ve all been guilty of initiating a print job, getting distracted, and then either forgetting to retrieve that job from the printer or printing it again by mistake. Or simply sending print jobs to the printer, discovering a mistake on the screen, and printing again. Or if the printer has an error, hitting the “print” button several times until something comes out. (You know you’ve done all of these). Pull printing ensures that users confirm the job only when they are prepared to pick it up—the equivalent of “Are you ready?” That could keep hundreds of print jobs per year from being reprinted unnecessarily or abandoned at the printer. Not only does that save paper, it also saves toner plus physical wear and tear on the machine.

With Pull Printing from PrinterLogic, you have two different configuration options that maximize the benefits of pull printing solutions:

• Pull/follow printing: Release print jobs to any capable printer
• Secure pull printing: Use one of three authorization methods to release print jobs

The first method can be implemented in PC/Mac, mobile and Chromebook environments. Users send jobs via PrinterLogic’s universal print driver to any enabled printer, and that job is securely stored until the user executes it using a release device.

The second method uses the native device driver to send jobs securely and maintain all original printer functionality, so it has to be implemented in PC/Mac environments. But by working with external or integrated badge readers, printer LCD consoles, or browser-equipped devices (such as a Chromebook or inexpensive mobile device), it ensures a higher level of security across the board. Under a secure pull printing scenario with badge authentication, for example, a print job could not be executed without the authorized badge of the user who initiated the print job.

As you’d expect based on our reputation for versatile print management software, PrinterLogic’s Pull Printing solution works with all printer manufacturers, which means even legacy devices can be made to work with pull printing functionality. It’s a cost-effective way to introduce extra security and savings into your print environment.

Posted by Devin Anderson

Virtual environments like Citrix, VDI and VMware are known for their flexibility and functionality, which is why they’re used in top-performing companies across the globe. However, they’re not without drawbacks. The advantages of centralized apps and remote collaboration don’t always pair well with the complexities of virtual enterprise printing, which makes virtual environments great for many use cases but less than optimal as print management solutions.

Instead of using the built-in options provided by virtualization software, many organizations turn to specialized printing management software like PrinterLogic to do the heavy lifting when it comes to virtual printing. That might seem like it would add another layer of management and maintenance, but it’s actually the opposite. We’ve designed PrinterLogic to work seamlessly alongside virtual environments to enhance their native printing features while delivering all the performance-boosting benefits you would expect from our world-class enterprise print management software.

Let’s take Citrix as an example. PrinterLogic offers you three different printing options to best suit your unique print environment:

• Use the Citrix Universal Printer
• Use session printers
• Use Citrix auto-created printers

With the first two options, PrinterLogic’s printing management software allows for print job compression—which, as you know, is essential in virtual environments where print jobs are often relayed via the WAN to the destination printer. Given all the printing activity that organizations see throughout the day, that can take a hefty toll on overall network performance.

PrinterLogic also enables driverless printing in these scenarios, so you don’t have to worry about the compatibility issues and software conflicts that result in panicked calls to the service desk. The icing on the cake, though, is the simplified administration that comes with PrinterLogic’s renowned print management capabilities. You’ll be able to create, deploy and manage printers across the enterprise from a single pane of glass.

When using Citrix auto-created printers, PrinterLogic brings a different set of equally useful features. Not only will you enjoy the convenience of Citrix Universal Driver support, your end users will have access to location-based printing (sometimes called proximity printing). PrinterLogic is able to dynamically install and remove nearby physical printers—even as users roam within a session. It’s not hard to see why that makes PrinterLogic one of the most sought-after solutions for print management in virtual environments.

And it doesn’t just improve Citrix printing. End users in VMware environments can also take advantage of location-based printing. PrinterLogic’s intelligent enterprise print management solution automatically gets the right printer to the right user every time. Plus you can fine-tune deployment criteria according to Active Directory (AD) user, group, organizational unit (OU), or hardware identifiers such as MAC addresses and endpoint hostnames.

Effective print management also involves powerful driver management, and again PrinterLogic outperforms out-of-the-box tools offered by virtualization software or lesser printing management solutions. Even in large virtual environments, PrinterLogic’s centralized management interface gives you an easy and intuitive way to administer specific drivers for endpoint devices.

Virtualization is certainly an incredible boon to the cutting-edge workplace, but it still struggles with the demands of enterprise printing. With PrinterLogic as your dedicated solution for print management, you get the best of both worlds—virtual or not!

Posted by Jordan Pusey

There are a number of frequently cited statistics about the costs of enterprise printing that should make anyone who operates within a budget—and let’s face it, that’s pretty much all of us—stop and think about the value of printer auditing software.

The first statistic is that the average printing cost for each employee impacts the company by between $600 and $1,300 per year (Citigroup-Environmental Defense study). That alone is reason for pause. What kind of cost breakdown would printer audit software reveal? For instance, how much of that cost is color ink when it could have been monochrome (at a fraction of the price)? How many single-sided pages could have been double-sided? Now imagine the aggregate savings you’d see by cutting that figure by 5, 20, or even as much as 40%!

But the second statistic is even more concerning: Close to 20% of all printed material is considered waste before it even leaves the printer. These are the pages that have a single URL on them when printing from a website. Or the few lines of pseudo-legal disclaimer text at the bottom of a printed e-mail that spill over onto another page. Or forgotten print jobs that sit in the tray for a week until someone scraps them. Or even someone hitting print, finding an error on the screen, and hitting print again. Some might even print several times during a printer outage only to discover all their extra prints sitting on the printer after the error clears.

Based on the figure above, that means consumable costs of $120 to $260 per employee are currently going straight into the recycle bin each year. That’s not only bad for the environment. It’s also bad for your bottom line.

Printer auditing software can help decrease the costs of consumables by allowing you to precisely track and summarize printing activity enterprise-wide according to a variety of criteria. Some examples are:

• Which department is doing a disproportionate amount of color printing?
• What are the company’s most heavily used printers?
• Who printed 33 single-sided copies of a 50-page report?
• How many employees are printing non-work-related documents like flyers and chain e-mails?

With the advantages of print audit support, you’ll know the answers to questions like these. That in turn will enable you to address the root causes by end-of-lifeing inefficient legacy devices, consolidating underutilized machines, or by changing individual behavior through awareness-raising initiatives.

That last one is huge, by the way. If you can remind employees to self-monitor their consumables usage with a successful campaign (“Don’t print it, PDF it!”) or through incentives (say, a bonus to the most print-efficient department), it’s possible to drive down enterprise printing costs significantly. But you need to have solid data in hand before you start shifting company policy.

PrinterLogic’s enterprise print management solution offers fully integrated print auditing software that has empowered companies to do all of the above. And we’ve got the testimonials to prove it. Multiple independent case studies with our customers have shown that organizations of all sizes have used PrinterLogic’s printer auditing module to slash the cost of consumables by 50% or more. So, in addition to the cost benefits of more streamlined, centralized print management, your organization can also see huge front-end gains from print auditing.

In short, tackling consumables usage is an easy way for your organization to realize steep, sustained cost savings very quickly. PrinterLogic’s powerful printer auditing software will give you the clear, concise, comprehensive data you need to go about it.

Posted by Andrew Miller

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. You’ve probably heard that expression countless times throughout your life. From time to time you might have even used it yourself when discussing different IT scenarios where the weakest links, as you know, are single points of failure. Your enterprise print environment is no exception to that, of course. But how many print management solutions are robust enough to maintain the full strength of the IT chain?

Very few, as it happens, especially when you’re dealing with traditional print management solutions like print servers. Print servers are notorious for being the root cause of downtime across departments or even entire organizations. And they don’t even have to suffer a catastrophic hardware failure. Sometimes an issue as trivial as a driver conflict or an installation hiccup can bring print servers to their knees—along with all the printing activity they control.

To compensate for their inherent lack of robustness, most IT teams add a secondary print server to create redundancy. The problem with these backup servers is that they’re usually no different to the primary servers they’re meant to support. They’re prone to the same vulnerabilities and shortcomings. Furthermore, they effectively double the cost of print management given that your organization is now operating, maintaining and replacing two servers for every one that should be in place. So not only does print server redundancy fall short of true robustness, it also can get pretty expensive.

Most print management solution providers know that this is the unfortunate status quo, but it’s not in their interest to disrupt it. They’ll happily sell you another license and advise you to buy additional hardware. That doesn’t fundamentally address single points of failure in a print environment; it merely provides a false sense of security—to the detriment of your bottom line.

Unlike conventional print management companies, PrinterLogic provides a proven way to eliminate single points of failure in your print environment. In addition to being quick and easy to administer, our centralized print management solution was developed to be incredibly robust, offering rock-solid reliability and unprecedented enterprise-wide availability.

When using PrinterLogic as your print management solution, you can:

• Continue printing during a WAN outage: Because PrinterLogic relays print jobs directly from the workstations to the printers themselves, there’s no need for traffic to travel across the WAN.
• Print as usual following a host server failure: Should your host server go down for any reason, PrinterLogic’s built-in redundancy allows your end users to keep printing with no loss in performance or functionality.
• Achieve high print management availability: By configuring a warm standby server, you’ll still be able to manage printers enterprise-wide in the event your primary server were to fail.

Hardware fails. Software crashes. These are inevitabilities in any IT environment. But it’s not impossible to move beyond print servers, eliminating these single points of failure that are the weakest links in print management. Realizing round-the-clock robustness begins with implementing PrinterLogic as your print management solution.

Posted by Jordan Pusey

Universal print drivers are meant to be one-size-fits-all solutions to common printing problems. And in many cases, they have the potential to be. That’s because universal print drivers are able to overcome many shortcomings of manufacturer-provided print drivers such as incompatibilities with (or lack of support for) certain operating systems, 32- and 64-bit confusion, and variations when printing to and from different devices.

In ideal situations, universal print drivers offer:

• A consistent printing experience: Regardless of whether an end user is printing locally or remotely, from a Mac desktop or a Windows laptop, to a legacy printer or a new enterprise-grade multifunction device, the functionality is the same when using a universal print driver. This is especially useful in an environment with diverse software and hardware.
• Less hassle for end users and IT: Because universal print drivers are designed to be more adaptable and require less device-specific configuration, there are fewer printing errors during routine use. That means increased productivity and fewer calls to the service desk.
• Reduced burden on the network: Universal print drivers generally make better use of bandwidth by compressing files before relaying them to the printer, which improves overall network performance and also translates to speedier printing.

But universal printer drivers can sometimes fall short. They don’t always replicate the features of native printer drivers, effectively limiting the features of multifunction machines that are otherwise capable of scanning and faxing as well. Universal print drivers can also produce artifacts if they aren’t fully compatible with your printers, so your end users could end up printing strings of odd symbols and characters in place of perfectly readable text.

Fortunately, PrinterLogic solves universal print driver problems by giving you the best of both worlds. Right out of the box, it supports all native and universal printer drivers, allowing you to choose whichever option best suits your print environment—or even a particular micro-environment within the organization. Thanks to its versatility, you can mix and match to choose the right driver from user to user. For example, by using PrinterLogic’s intuitive centralized management console, you can easily assign custom or manufacturer-supplied drivers to certain devices, or you can opt to default to a universal print driver in given situations.

That fine-grained customization applies to virtual environments as well. With Citrix sessions, for instance, PrinterLogic enables you to seamlessly use native printer drivers, or you can opt for driverless printing when using session printers or the Citrix Universal Printer. PrinterLogic also supports the Citrix Universal Printer Driver.

PrinterLogic actually leverages the flexibility of universal print drivers to provide additional functionality. When the optional Pull Printing module is installed, users are able to send print jobs via a universal print driver. Once the job is initiated, they can then “pull” (i.e., execute) that print job at any enabled printer at their discretion. It’s an intelligent, cost-effective and versatile way to maximize printing security within your organization.

Universal print drivers can occasionally be problematic, but that shouldn’t force you to sacrifice their many benefits. With PrinterLogic, you can easily tailor your enterprise print environment to enjoy the advantages of native and universal printer drivers.

Contact us today for a free trial or demo to see what PrinterLogic can do to improve your print environment.

Posted by Jordan Pusey

Printing is often the final piece of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) puzzle. Your end users are all set up and successfully connected to a remote session from an endpoint device, but then they need to print a document to a physical printer that might very well be located just a few feet away—only to find that it’s unavailable. The solution to this common problem lies in simplifying virtual desktop printing for admins as well as users throughout the organization. But how?

PrinterLogic makes remote session printing both reliable and manageable because it removes that element of uncertainty from remote and VDI printing. Thanks to PrinterLogic’s streamlined approach to enterprise print management, you can easily deploy network printers or direct IP printers into remote and VDI sessions automatically based on criteria that you specify, such as:

• The name of the endpoint device
• IP address
• Active Directory (AD) group, organizational unit (OU) or container membership of the endpoint device
• AD user or group membership of the user who is logging on

You can even set the default printer automatically for the initial session or for all future sessions. Because very few enterprise environments are entirely homogeneous, most of the above options apply to Windows and non-Windows endpoint devices alike. And it doesn’t take convoluted Group Policy Objects or advanced scripting to get a handle on virtual desktop printing. It’s all made possible through straightforward configuration in PrinterLogic’s central administration console.

PrinterLogic also simplifies virtual desktop printing through smart, practical features like dynamic deployment. Let’s say the end user disconnects from one session and joins from a different endpoint device. The printers that were installed according to the previous endpoint device’s deployment criteria will be silently and automatically removed, then new printers will be added according to the current endpoint device’s deployment criteria.

Not only does this make administration of remote session printing much simpler, it actually speeds up remote login times for the end user because there are no remote desktop printing login scripts or GPOs to process before establishing each session. Printers are instantly created within the session, so end users can get to work—and get printing—without delay, increasing productivity.

Of course, automation isn’t desirable in every case for remote desktop printing. That’s where PrinterLogic’s self-service portal comes in. This portal empowers end users to install their own printers using a convenient and intuitive web-based interface. No matter what their skill level or location, end users will be able to identify, select and install nearby printers with a single click.

VDI and remote environments can be tricky enough to maintain without the added complexity of printing. PrinterLogic simplifies virtual desktop printing so you can be sure your end users are getting the right printers as soon as they need them.

Posted by Devin Anderson

It’s a familiar story. Maybe it starts with a company adding a new branch. Or two firms merging. Or an oversized department being split and moved into a different location. Then, as the IT environment rearranges itself to accommodate the changes, the attention turns to the easiest way to provide printing capabilities to this new pool of workstations. All too often the answer comes back: “Print servers.”

Truth be told, print servers have never been ideal. They started out as a common response to enterprise growth and print management requirements because they were considered to be cost-effective and scalable. But if we take a step back for some perspective, print servers are actually stopgap and piecemeal—as inefficient as constructing an apartment building one room at a time.

Although conventional wisdom holds that print servers are still the best method of enterprise print management, the reality is that people have simply learned to live with their many drawbacks.

Let’s briefly consider some of them:

• High cost: Every print server in your organization comes with attendant costs: licensing, software and hardware redundancy, security, cooling and power, and so on. Far from being cost-effective, print servers look more like white elephants when you take all the costs of purchase, maintenance, upgrades and replacement into account.
• Poor management: All those patches, updates and security measures take effort to oversee and administer, forcing you to concentrate as much on print server management as you do on printer management. Furthermore, printer management—the very thing enterprise print servers are supposed to facilitate—is obfuscated by print servers. Juggling 32- and 64-bit drivers, struggling with getting default settings to stick, trying to reliably deploy printers to a target group — these are just a few examples of how printer servers hinder more than they help.
• Wasted time: Network print servers are time vortexes. Just think of all the hours spent on installing new drivers, troubleshooting crashes and stuck jobs, testing print server backups, migrating print servers, and configuring and managing both the print servers and the printers they control. Over the course of a year it easily adds up to hundreds of man-hours—which equates to lost productivity and has a direct negative effect on the bottom line.
• Risk: It’s no great secret that enterprise print servers are single points of failure. That’s why so much time, expense and effort is put into redundancy, and even highly strategized redundancy isn’t guaranteed to keep your print environment from experiencing occasional outages due to driver conflicts and other issues.

In light of those issues, it’s a wonder why organizations continue to use printer servers at all—especially when there’s a solution like PrinterLogic.

Unlike print servers, PrinterLogic really does improve your print management in ways that you can both see and measure. It gives you access to effortless printer deployment and configuration from a centralized Web-based console, increasing the transparency, reliability and efficiency of your print environment. And by enabling your organization to eliminate print servers altogether, it can save you all the headache and cost that accompanies them.