Posted by Jordan Pusey

All too often, network printer management involves tradeoffs. Robust solutions are hardly ever simple. Simple solutions are rarely secure.

And so the idea of installing network printers in a way that’s both easy and secure across an entire organization becomes something like a distant dream. That’s why many organizations settle for traditional print management solutions like print servers: Because they think network printer management software that does not require compromises just doesn’t exist.

It’s time to think again. We’ve designed PrinterLogic to be an incredibly efficient network print management solution that gives you and your end users a whole host of possibilities for printer installation while streamlining and securing the installation process through centralized administrative control. It can be implemented seamlessly in any existing environment, and what’s more, it has additional modules that can provide even greater oversight and deliver an even higher level of security to your print environment.

PrinterLogic’s network print management software simplifies printer installation by putting power in the hands of your end users. By using the intuitive PrinterLogic self-service portal, which is a uniform Web-based interface, users have the ability to browse the list of available printers, select the correct one for installation, and then automatically install it with a single click. You can even upload floorplan maps so that end users can locate, identify and install printers using visual references. No matter the size of your organization, this end user empowerment has the potential to offset one of the largest reasons for service desk calls—potential that’s been confirmed by our customers over and over again.

Of course, empowering end users shouldn’t come at the expense of administrative control. With PrinterLogic’s straightforward centralized management, you can easily deploy printers to end users according to the following criteria:

• Active Directory user, computer, group, or container
• Organizational unit (OU)
• IP address ranges

…all without resorting to complex scripts or group policy objects (GPOs). That means users can only install the printers they are authorized to, and it doesn’t take admins hours of wrangling with a long list of criteria to ensure that end users aren’t able to access printers they shouldn’t.

That powerful but simple administrative control extends to print drivers too. Once PrinterLogic is implemented as your network printer management software, you can easily administer driver updates, change profile settings, and make custom configurations—selectively or en masse, manually or automatically. Not only does this granular management avoid printer driver conflicts, it also locks down crucial waypoints in the pursuit of end-to-end printing security.

Then you have the option of installing modules that introduce features like Print Auditing and Secure Printing. Print Auditing gives you macro- and micro-level oversight over your entire print environment, so you can quantify consumables usage and monitor detailed printing activity at a glance. Secure Printing offers three different release mechanisms to safeguard against print jobs being executed or viewed by unauthorized users during the final step in the printing chain.

In line with PrinterLogic delivering multiple benefits, both modules can also cut costs by helping to reduce waste in addition to securing your enterprise print environment. Where other solutions can only offer tradeoffs, PrinterLogic’s network print management software enables you to truly have it all.

Posted by Jordan Pusey

If your organization runs a Citrix environment, chances are that you’ve come across proximity-based printing. This is a feature that automatically installs nearby printers for users based on their physical location. As you can imagine, proximity printing with Citrix is incredibly useful in modern enterprise environments because it allows roaming and mobile users to move from floor to floor, building to building, and site to site without having to struggle with complicated printer install processes. Even in static environments, end-user printer installation is typically one of the most problematic aspects of enterprise and virtual printing, so Citrix’s proximity-based printing has the potential to be a real time and resource saver—as long as it’s set up properly.

Setting up proximity printing with Citrix is fairly straightforward, provided you bear in mind that “proximity” is something of a misnomer. This feature actually uses virtual network addresses—not, say, GPS or WiFi triangulation—to determine where a user is located. That’s why it’s a good idea to have some basic pieces in place before beginning: most importantly, distinct network properties (e.g., different subnets) for each separate “area” where users might want to have printers installed. The more granular, the better. This way, Citrix will have an easier time mapping the correct local network printers when a user initiates a session and is assigned an IP address.

Once that’s taken care of, there are some administrative settings to configure to implement proximity-based printing correctly:

• In Citrix, create an individual policy for each subnet or geographic location.
• Using the session printing policy rule, activate proximity printing with Citrix.
• Now add the printers for the chosen area into the policy you’ve created.
• Make sure that the default printer policy does not change the end user’s default printer setting.
• Finally, set the policy to filter according to the client’s IP address.

With those policies in place, your end users will now be able to enjoy the convenience of proximity printing with Citrix—although they’ll still have other printing issues to contend with. Virtual environments might offer a lot of benefits, but seamless, trouble-free printing isn’t always one of them.

PrinterLogic is an enterprise print management solution that works in conjunction with Citrix to leverage its strengths and address its shortcomings. So, for example, PrinterLogic works with proximity-based printing in Citrix to deliver even more flexible and targeted automatic printer installations. When using PrinterLogic alongside Citrix, you can add printers to a workstation according to the following additional criteria:

• Computer (host) name
• Active Directory computer or group
• Active Directory Organizational Unit (OU) membership

Along with enhanced proximity-based printing, PrinterLogic also enables you to take advantage of three different printing methods in Citrix: using the Citrix Universal Printer, session printers, or Citrix auto-created printers. These give you access to further benefits such as print job compression, driverless printing, and—of course—PrinterLogic’s legendary ease of administration.

The best way to set up proximity printing in Citrix, then, is with PrinterLogic. Many of our customers would say it’s the only way. To learn more, visit our case studies page.

Posted by Jordan Pusey

Since 2008 or so, the enterprise sector has made a slow but concerted migration toward 64-bit architecture on account of such benefits as improved scalability, more powerful processing, and vastly increased memory addressability. Laptops, workstations, servers, and even mobile devices have shifted to a combination of 64-bit hardware and software to take advantage of these benefits. Yet that can result in a number of problems—especially 64-bit printing issues—in all kinds of network environments.

For print environments that continue to incorporate residual 32-bit architecture, the mix of 32- and 64-bit platforms can be especially tricky. Running the two in tandem involves the same concessions and workarounds as maintaining any other still-functional legacy technology: say, 802.11b WiFi networks or end-of-life operating systems. Many of the new 64-bit advantages will be unavailable to legacy devices. At the same time, supporting backwards compatibility with 32-bit devices has the potential to handicap the functionality of the 64-bit devices while regularly eating up engineers’ time and energy.

Not everything is smooth sailing for environments that are exclusively 64-bit, either. Some printers still lack 64-bit drivers, so they must be sidelined or retired in the new environment – which can mean a loss of productivity or additional hardware expense to replace them. And if a 32-bit guest tries to enter to the print environment, it will most likely result in long calls to the service desk as the problems are ironed out.

Common 64-bit printing issues include:

• 32- and 64-bit incompatibility: Printer drivers are either 32-bit or 64-bit, not both. This can result in serious incompatibility issues when 32-bit operating systems are unable to access a 64-bit driver (or vice versa). Trying to manage and reliably deploy these different print drivers in hybrid environments, especially when print servers are installed, can be a nightmare scenario.
• Legacy devices: Drivers are the vital link between printers and workstations. If a manufacturer has only issued 32-bit drivers for a particular printer, it’s simply unusable in a 64-bit environment. On the flip side, if a printer only has 64-bit drivers, it will not be compatible with 32-bit workstations. This has the potential to obsolete a lot of hardware before its time.
• Spooler crashes and other performance hits: Much like print drivers, 32- and 64-bit print spoolers are not one and the same. If 32/64-bit incompatibilities exist within the print environment, these can have productivity-hindering repercussions further down the printing chain in the form of print spooler hangs and crashes. Likewise, general printing performance can be negatively impacted by these issues, slowing or even halting printing outright.

PrinterLogic’s print management software is an easy-to-implement, enterprise-wide fix for 64-bit printing issues like these. By providing effortless print driver management, universal printing support, centralized printer administration, and automated deployment without the need for group policy objects (GPOs) or scripts, it eliminates driver incompatibilities and prolongs the useful life of legacy devices in hybrid as well as all-64-bit print environments.

With PrinterLogic, 32-bit and 64-bit drivers can coexist seamlessly and be quickly configured for specific workstations. What’s more, PrinterLogic has the ability to eliminate print servers altogether, further reducing the 64-bit printing issues—not to mention all the other hassles—that can arise in print environments that continue to rely on them. That not only makes your organization’s 64-bit printing transition smoother, it makes all of enterprise print management easier and more cost-effective.

Posted by Devin Anderson

As the idea of pull printing becomes more commonplace, more and more organizations are thinking about how exactly pull printing solutions might enhance their print environments. But before I tell you how you can use PrinterLogic to improve your enterprise pull printing capabilities, let me begin with a pull printing definition.

Pull printing introduces a deliberate and often necessary second step into the printing process. The first step is the initiation of a print job via the universal print driver—which, if you’re using PrinterLogic, could be done using a PC, Mac, Chromebook, or even a mobile device. The second step is the “pull.” This gives the user who initiated the print job the ability to pull down that job at any Pull Printing-enabled printer, entirely at their discretion.

What exactly is the benefit of a pull printing solution like that? To begin with, it means that a user can initiate a print job from his or her usual workstation, then “pull” that job at a printer in an entirely different building. That could conveniently save the user from having to carry a large print job from one location to another, or it could allow a mobile user to initiate a job on the road and pull it upon arriving.

More importantly, though, it’s about security. If a user initiates a print job and fails to claim it right away, it sits in the output tray for anyone to see. It could be private memo, a sensitive e-mail, specs for a top-secret project, or even a confidential report. Pull printing solutions like PrinterLogic’s Pull Printing module ensure that the user is prepared to retrieve documents like those before they actually begin printing.

PrinterLogic also allows for secure pull printing through its Secure Printing feature. Unlike standard Pull Printing, the first step of Secure Printing sends the print job through a specific printer driver to a dedicated printer, so all native integrity and functionality is maintained. Then, as above, the user can pull the job at that printer when he or she is ready. PrinterLogic’s Secure Printing offers you the choice of three different release mechanisms to best integrate with your current or future enterprise print environment:

• Browser-based release: Any device capable of running a browser (e.g., PC/Mac, Chromebook, mobile device) can be used to access PrinterLogic’s Web-based app and release print jobs securely. This way you can place a spare Android or iOS device in dedicated console mode and associate it with certain printers to act as a release station.
• Badge/card reader release: A reader is placed at the printer or is already built into it. This badge/card reader then integrates with your existing badge system to release the print jobs associated with that badge.
• Printer console release: The PrinterLogic app is installed directly on a printer, enabling users to login and release their print jobs right from the device’s LCD.

Unlike lesser pull printing solutions, PrinterLogic’s standard or secure pull printing doesn’t require you to invent custom workarounds (potentially compromising security in other ways) to implement it enterprise-wide. It can be deployed seamlessly alongside our print management solution, so you can easily and quickly enhance your enterprise’s pull printing capabilities while enjoying PrinterLogic’s renowned benefits like centralized administration, self-service installation, and effortless printer/driver management.

Posted by Andrew Miller

When weighing their print management options, savvy professionals can usually pare their concerns down to one two-part question: How much will it cost and how long will it take to implement?

Well, we at PrinterLogic have an impressive answer to that: Almost nothing (or less!), and no time at all. That’s based on new data from the independent research firm TechValidate collected through individual surveys with verified PrinterLogic customers in the manufacturing industry.

Asked about the speed of deployment (TVID:
9A7-403-41C), an incredible one-third of these manufacturing companies said it took them only one day to fully install PrinterLogic. Think of it—24 hours or less to implement our time- and cost-saving print management solution enterprise-wide! All but 4% of the remaining respondents reported that deploying PrinterLogic had taken them less than five days. What’s more, there wasn’t a single respondent in this survey who said that it had taken longer than ten days to implement PrinterLogic throughout their entire organization.

Just to put those statistics in further context: These are large and medium-sized industrial manufacturing companies, many of whom had been reliant on print servers for years—if not decades. They represent a variety of sectors within their industry, including professional services, energy and utilities, education, nonprofits, and real estate. And yet, across the board, we see not only remarkable speeds of deployment with PrinterLogic but consistency among those timeframes as well.

With such rapid speeds of deployment, it’s no wonder that companies in this same industry saw downright astounding returns on investment (ROI) after implementing PrinterLogic, as they recently reported in a separate TechValidate survey (TVID:
C7F-C97-38E). A full 90% of these respondents stated without reservation that their organizations had realized ROI of 100% or more since deploying PrinterLogic. That means PrinterLogic had already fully paid for itself and was continuing to generate additional returns over the long-term.

Half of the respondents in this same survey even reported ROI greater than 200%. One-quarter of them saw ROI as high as 300% or more. Better still, one out of every ten reported ROI in excess of 500%.

What hard data like this shows is that the companies experiencing these outstanding results with PrinterLogic aren’t outliers. We’re not talking about a single instance where a PrinterLogic customer saw jaw-dropping ROI or enjoyed lightning-fast speed of deployment. With PrinterLogic, it’s clear that results like these tend to be the rule rather than the exception.

And that goes for all industries, not just manufacturing. If you’re considering PrinterLogic for your organization, we encourage you to check out our wide-ranging
portfolio of case studies, where you’ll find in-depth interviews with and reports on PrinterLogic customers of all sizes and sectors. These case studies are the perfect counterpart to TechValidate surveys like the ones above because they provide firsthand details on how PrinterLogic’s flexible, streamlined approach to print management has benefitted hundreds of diverse organizations all over the world. Why not make yours the next?

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Posted by Jordan Pusey

Even the most hardcore proponents of Citrix environments will admit that Citrix printing leaves a lot to be desired. Part of this is because enterprise printing is already so fraught with complexity. Different operating systems running different versions of drivers for different printers produced by different manufacturers—the permutations of all the things that can go wrong are almost infinite, especially in large and distributed organizations. And printing through Citrix introduces a whole new set of possible variables that can result in all kinds of errors.

As this headache is pretty widespread, a list of best practices has sprung up around Citrix printing and how to maintain Citrix print drivers in order to smooth some of the turbulence when printing in your virtual environment. These include:

• Printing directly to the printer or print server instead of falling back on the virtual platform. This generally keeps print traffic at a minimum as it passes through the WAN to the Citrix server, which can consume valuable bandwidth and negatively impact network performance.
• Avoiding third-party drivers. Instead most admins and Citrix veterans recommend using native drivers or the Citrix Universal Printer Driver to minimize incompatibilities. At worst, these incompatibilities can crash user workstations. At best, they can hang the spooler or the print server.
• Using a common set of limited drivers (or remapping to similar client drivers) as a way to achieve stability—albeit at the risk of sacrificing basic printer functionality.
• Batch-purging old or “ghost” print jobs periodically.
• Holding out on Citrix hotfixes for fear that they might introduce new incompatibilities while addressing old ones.
• Disabling automatic driver loading to prevent the dreaded third-party drivers from being installed.
• Installing a print server at every unique physical location to help with load distribution and print management.

That’s not a bad list as these things go, but it’s still far from ideal. Avoiding third-party drivers? Limiting the driver pool at the expense of printer functionality? Installing print servers at every location? Those sound more like restrictions and unnecessary impositions than best practices.

When it comes to Citrix printing, PrinterLogic is the best practice you can have. Our enterprise print management solution integrates seamlessly with Citrix while leveraging its strengths and compensating for its shortcomings. That means everyone in your organization can print reliably and consistently without having to worry about conflicts between Citrix print drivers, loss of functionality, stuck jobs, heavy WAN load, additional hardware, and other Citrix printing issues.

By using PrinterLogic in conjunction with Citrix, you’re able to choose between three printing methods:

• Citrix Universal Printer: PrinterLogic provisions direct IP printers to the endpoint device and then prints to the Citrix Universal Printer. This enables print job compression, driverless printing and streamlined print management.
• Session printers: Session printers are provisioned using direct IP but without the Citrix Universal Printer. This also allows for driverless printing and streamlined print management.
• Citrix auto-created printers: Here, too, direct IP session printers are provisioned. This method allows instant printer creation, improved server performance, support for the Citrix Universal Printer, proximity printing, self-service printer installation and much more.

Whichever of those Citrix printing methods you choose, it brings all the benefits—and more—intended by the best practices above, yet it shrinks the list to one quick, simple and cost-effective step: Implementing PrinterLogic.

Posted by Andrew Miller

There always has to be a tradeoff, right? You can have it fast, but it’s going to cost you. You can see guaranteed results, but you’re going to have to be patient. You’ll get more administrative control, but it will result in additional complexity.

With PrinterLogic, there’s no but—only and: Powerful, efficient print management and reduced server infrastructure and rapid return on investment (ROI).

That’s what more and more of our customers are discovering, as continued studies by TechValidate have shown. Since implementing PrinterLogic, hundreds of organizations surveyed by this independent research firm stated that they’ve been able to eliminate their former print servers (along with the attendant costs) while reducing time spent on print management to result in a quick ROI of just 12 months or less.

According to one recent survey of 333 users of PrinterLogic (TVID:

B45-30E-C43

), an incredible 79% of the respondents said that they had reduced their organizations’ remote server infrastructure by 30% or more after installing our enterprise print management solution. That roughly equates to eliminating one print server out of every three, on average – and with it the related costs of maintenance, upgrade, migration and replacement.

And that reduction in infrastructure also resulted in greater management efficiency. In another recent survey that sampled 397 PrinterLogic users (TVID:

9A4-1A9-FBB

), 71% of the respondents stated that their organizations had slashed time spent on print management by half or even more as a direct result of installing PrinterLogic. In practical terms, that means nearly three out of every four of these organizations now devote less than one hour to print management for every two they used to require. At that rate, imagine the increased productivity and cost savings over a single month!

All that time saved and permanently reduced infrastructure amounted to significant cost savings in the form of ROI, as a third survey shows (TVID:

C76-7AF-83A

). Out of a sample of 412 PrinterLogic customers, more than three-quarters of those surveyed by TechValidate noted that they had been able to break even on their investment in PrinterLogic in just 12 months’ time. That means they saw immediate cost savings. And today, instead of the ongoing costs of print servers, PrinterLogic is continuing to pay for itself several times over. Everything from this point on adds right to their bottom line.

What these and all previous TechValidate surveys prove is that PrinterLogic is the enterprise printing solution that successfully delivers on every single count. To reap the benefits of centralized print management and empowered end users, your organization doesn’t have to compromise on cost, oversight, efficiency, security, or any of the other qualities essential to your print environment or your business. Why make concessions when you can have it all?

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Posted by Devin Anderson

Thanks to proximity-based printing in Citrix, it’s possible for users to have nearby network printers automatically installed on their devices based on their current location. For example, a mobile employee with her own laptop can visit a different branch every day and have the local printers installed from the moment she initiates the Citrix session. Because this feature is so convenient for the end user as well as the service desk, proximity-based printing is something that many organizations wouldn’t dream of operating without.

Even though “proximity” suggests geospatial criteria, the method Citrix uses is actually network-based. When nearby printers are automatically installed for our hypothetical branch-hopping mobile employee, Citrix is actually determining her IP and mapping to a network printer (along with the corresponding driver) in the same subnet.

Setting up proximity printing with Citrix is pretty straightforward. Here’s a general step-by-step for Virtual Apps and Virtual Desktops:

• Start by creating a unique Citrix policy for each subnet. These subnets can be assigned to branches, floors or even departments. The more specific your network is, the more accurate proximity printing will be.
• Enable proximity printing. You can do this using the session printing policy rule under Citrix policies.
• Choose the desired printers. Add the printers within that subnet to the Citrix policy.
• Select the default policy. Be sure to assign the default printer policy, not the user’s default printer setting.
• Set the filtering criteria. Enable the client IP address as the policy filter.

Of course, the absolute best way to set up proximity printing with Citrix is by using PrinterLogic. That’s because, even in advanced virtual environments like Citrix, deploying and administering printers or managing drivers across the entire enterprise can be a real challenge. And virtual environments come with their own inherent printing drawbacks, such as print jobs generating extra WAN traffic that can degrade network performance.

PrinterLogic builds on existing technologies like proximity-based printing while working seamlessly alongside Citrix to make enterprise printing and print management exponentially easier. By implementing PrinterLogic in a Citrix environment, you can also automatically install printers on a workstation according to multiple criteria such as:

• IP address
• Computer (host) name
• Active Directory (AD) computer or group
• AD organizational unit (OU) membership

And in addition to enhanced proximity-based printing, with PrinterLogic you and your end users can enjoy benefits like instant printer creation, improved Citrix server performance, support for the Citrix Universal Printer Driver, end-user self-service printer installation and freedom from the hassle of rights management.

There’s no doubt that Citrix and its proximity-based printing capabilities are incredibly useful, but it’s possible to take your enterprise print environment even further. To make it more feature-rich while making it even easier to manage. To empower your end users and reduce the burden on the service desk. That’s why setting up proximity printing with Citrix should involve setting up PrinterLogic too.