Posted by Jordan Pusey

Virtual environments are great, but some of their demands would put divas and rock stars to shame. With Citrix, for instance, it’s necessary to identify and acquire the specific printers supported on Citrix Virtual Apps, else you could run into numerous compatibility problems. That limits choice and has the potential to drive up the costs of purchase or replacement, particularly when upgrading to newer versions of Citrix with different hardware requirements.

Wouldn’t you prefer to have a solution that allowed your organization to enjoy the advantages of Citrix environments while conducting Citrix printing on your own terms?

PrinterLogic is an enterprise print management solution that integrates seamlessly with any Citrix environment to expand your options beyond the restrictions imposed by Citrix printing compatibility. Its flexibility means you can use any printer—even legacy models or niche brands, not just the printers supported by Citrix Virtual Apps—while its robustness minimizes such issues as driver conflicts and incorrect deployments that can affect even the most by-the-book Citrix printing scenarios.

Because of PrinterLogic’s incredible versatility, you’re able choose among three different Citrix printer provisioning methods to best suit your print environment: Using the Citrix Universal Printer, using session printers, or using Citrix auto-created printers through PrinterLogic’s powerful direct IP session provisioning. Each method brings its own benefits, which include:

• Print job compression: PrinterLogic takes advantage of the ICA protocol, which optimizes WAN bandwidth usage and accelerates overall network performance by compressing print jobs immediately after they are initiated.
• Proximity printing: By building on the Citrix printing backbone, PrinterLogic can automatically deploy session printers to users depending on variables like Active Directory (AD) computer, group or organizational unit (OU) membership; hardware (MAC) or IP address; and more. If users roam during a session or reconnect from a different endpoint device, PrinterLogic dynamically removes old printers and deploys printers near the new location.
• Self-service portal: Session users can take advantage of PrinterLogic’s acclaimed web-based portal to easily identify, select and install nearby printers themselves with a single click. This has been proven to lead to drastic reductions in routine calls to the service desk, saving time and costs.
• No more rights management: PrinterLogic makes deployment a breeze through intuitive criteria configurations, eliminating the need for scripts and complex group policy objects (GPOs).
• Driverless printing: To ensure maximum compatibility with the widest range of devices, PrinterLogic enables Citrix printing with the Citrix Universal Printer as well as their built in Citrix universal driver..
• Effortless centralized management: Administer every printer and driver throughout the enterprise from a single pane of glass. Quickly make individual profile edits on the fly or push out bulk changes during downtime. All your organization’s printers and printer drivers are automatically managed and updated on all Citrix servers.

So stop worrying about which printers are compatible with Citrix and which ones aren’t. PrinterLogic makes Citrix printing work for you—not the other way around.

Posted by Jordan Pusey

It’s a time of major change in the enterprise. Ready or not, mobile users are radically altering the network topography, and nowhere does this have more impact than in your print environment. Are your mobile printing capabilities up to the task?

Some organizations have already taken tentative steps toward implementing mobile printing, such as purchasing a small number of printers enabled with Google Cloud Print functionality or iOS printing. But those aren’t true enterprise mobile printing solutions. They’re stopgaps. Not only do they complicate the print environment by introducing extra hardware, they aren’t as scalable as generally accessible network printers. When it comes time to expand a print environment to include even more mobile users and a wider variety of devices, that small pool of mobile-printing-enabled printers will limit rather than accommodate growth.

Now imagine if you could enable any printer in your organization—even legacy devices—with platform-agnostic universal mobile printing capabilities. Without any extra software for your mobile users to install. For full-featured mobile printing from any device.

That’s Mobile Printing from PrinterLogic. Our enterprise mobile printing solution provides all of those benefits and even offers BYOD and guest printing, giving organizations like yours an easy, near-universal way to simplify your mobile printing infrastructure while expanding your mobile printing capabilities.

With PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing native mobile printing features, all iOS users have to do is tap the “Share” button on their mobile devices. By choosing “Print” and then selecting a PrinterLogic printer, they can easily print any document. Android and Chromebook users simply use the native print button and select the PrinterLogic printer. It doesn’t matter if they’re using an iPhone, a previous-generation Android-powered tablet or a brand new Chromebook — this straightforward user experience is the native device experience. They can print to any network printer, regardless of that device’s native mobile printing capabilities, and there’s absolutely no need for them to install any printers or special software clients.

For BYOD and guest users, the process is just as streamlined. PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing uses reliable email-to-print functionality so that all these users have to do is send documents to a printer’s dedicated email address. Those documents will then enter the queue like any other print job. This works even if the users are off-network, which means their devices don’t have to be connected to internal WiFi to be able to print.

Naturally, this incredible ease of use goes hand in hand with the security you’d expect of enterprise mobile printing. That’s why Mobile Printing from PrinterLogic lets you:

• Maintain oversight: While enjoying the convenience of mobile printing capabilities, your organization retains total control over both the users and printers that are authorized for mobile printing.
• Enforce limits: Set caps on how much guests are able to print as well as the file types they’re allowed to print. You can even limit printer functionality to black-and-white printing and more.
• Control individual print jobs: Through printer-specific release, your mobile employees can choose to automatically release a print job to a designated printer.

So while it’s true that mobile, BYOD and guest users are profoundly reshaping the enterprise, you can meet that change head-on with PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing solution. Contact us today to get get secure, scalable, enterprise-grade mobile printing capabilities without upheavals in workflow and massive infrastructure investment.

Posted by Andrew Miller

“PrinterLogic looks outstanding—exactly the print management solution we’ve been searching for. But will it really work with my unique print environment?”

Through e-mails, phone calls and in person at trade shows, we’ve heard many variations of that question. Knowing the innate versatility of PrinterLogic and the success our customers have had in implementing our print management solution across a variety of scenarios, our answer is always the same: Regardless of your print environment, we’ve got you covered.

There are generally six types of specialized printing found in the enterprise, and PrinterLogic works beautifully with all of them:

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) printing: Virtual environments bring a number of advantages to the enterprise, but trouble-free printing isn’t one of them. PrinterLogic integrates seamlessly with your existing virtual environments (e.g., VMware, Citrix) to deliver the centralized administration and effortless deployments you need to keep enterprise printing running smoothly—all without the need for dreaded group policy objects (GPOs) or complex scripting. Have a look at this blog post for more info on how PrinterLogic enhances and complements VDI.

BYOD printing: One of the fastest-growing segments in enterprise IT is the BYOD user. PrinterLogic allows you to embrace the use of personal devices in your print environment without the usual setup and security headaches. With our Mobile Printing solution, you can leverage the proven ease and reliability of email-to-print functionality, giving your BYOD users and guests a simple but controlled method of printing documents internally to any authorized printer.

Mobile printing: Much the same as with BYOD printing, PrinterLogic makes it astoundingly easy to incorporate enterprise-level mobile printing capabilities into your existing print environment through its acclaimed Mobile Printing solution. Amazingly, there’s no need for your mobile users to install any printers or software clients. Mobile Printing is intuitive enough for users of any skill level. Plus it works with any mobile device and any printer—even legacy hardware.

Pull printing: To clamp down on waste and increase document security, many organizations have considered implementing pull printing, which adds a separate “execution” step to select print jobs. PrinterLogic’s convenient Pull Printing solution provides two different methods—pull (or “follow”) printing and secure printing—for your organization to ensure that documents are securely stored until they’re ready to be retrieved. Each method is designed with the flexibility to suit your equipment and workflow.

Electronic medical/health records (EMR, EHR) printing: PrinterLogic augments EMR/EHR systems and solves the common printing issues—such as driver conflicts and error-prone printer installations—that cause so much frustration and negatively impact productivity. Check out this case study on Princeton Community Hospital to see just one example of how PrinterLogic streamlined the organization’s MEDITECH EHR environment.

In every case, PrinterLogic not only has the ability to replicate the functionality of print servers but to eliminate them altogether, saving your organization the costs of maintenance, replacement and upgrading while putting powerful centralized management in the hands of IT and innovative tools in the hands of your empowered end users.

Posted by Devin Anderson

Printer drivers can be the most challenging aspect of keeping any enterprise print environment running smoothly. It’s one thing to juggle and maintain interoperability between different workstations with different operating systems, but dealing with enterprise-level printer driver management is something else altogether.

It’s not hard to see why. Printer drivers introduce a whole host of new variables into your print environment. Not only does each major operating system require its own driver, each iteration of that operating system requires a discrete printer driver as well—and that goes for every printer a workstation needs to access. So if you have two versions of Windows interfacing with a single HP printer model, that’s two drivers. Okay, simple enough. But if you have three versions of Windows plus a Mac that need to interface with two different HP printer models, you’re now talking about managing up to eight separate printer drivers just for that small environment. And for each workstation/printer driver/printer permutation there’s a laundry list of things that can go wrong.

What makes this even more challenging is that those printer drivers have to be administered and reliably deployed to the right workstations. Subsequent printer driver updates have to be tested and pushed out to the right users. With so many moving parts, the complexity and the potential pitfalls of printer driver management are legendary. Just ask any admin who has to maintain 32- and 64-bit versions of the same printer drivers alongside one another.

In traditional print environments—particularly those that still rely on print servers—it’s easy to lose control of printer driver management and experience driver conflicts as a matter of course. This not only creates headaches for IT, it also creates headaches for end users who then turn around and call the service desk, creating even more support tickets for IT to deal with.

Without centralized administration and driver deployments targeted with pinpoint accuracy, there’s little hope of fully getting to grips with printer driver management and eliminating conflicts.

Fortunately, PrinterLogic offers both. Our print management solution allows you to compile and maintain a common printer driver repository from a single console, giving you the ability to identify and deploy the right driver to every user in your organization—automatically and without the usual WAN overhead. This makes the update process easier too. You can roll out new printer drivers to a select group of users or the entire enterprise, ensuring that you always have the most current, stable and secure releases.

Another way PrinterLogic helps you eliminate printer driver conflicts is through powerful but simple driver configuration. If you’re aware of a problematic feature, you can access advanced printer driver settings to adjust every possible printer function. You can also pre-configure driver settings (e.g., dpi, duplexing, paper size, source), specify default settings with the click of a checkbox, and choose to apply those settings following the initial installation or each time a user logs on. And these benefits are even available in virtual environments like VMware and Citrix.

Through PrinterLogic, you’ll regain complete control over your printer driver management and your enterprise print environment as a whole. Then you’ll see that printer driver conflicts aren’t a fact of life. They’re actually a thing of the past.

Posted by Andrew Miller

How much are print servers costing your organization? That’s not a rhetorical question. We really do want to know—because that’s a large portion of how much you’ll be saving by eliminating print servers and choosing PrinterLogic as your enterprise print management solution.

In a recent survey of approximately 200 PrinterLogic customers, the independent research firm TechValidate asked about the total costs of provisioning and maintaining print servers. Total cost is important because it accounts for obvious expenditures such as hardware and software but also the “invisible” costs like labor and hosting. Those invisible items can have a big impact on bottom line but don’t always get factored into print management estimates.

Nearly 70% of the customers surveyed said it cost them between $1,000 and $3,000 to provision each new print server or replace an existing one. The remaining one-third of respondents reported that it cost their organization $3,000 or more—with close to 10% stating figures in excess of $6,000 per print server!

Of course, you could justify that (and many organizations do) by saying that provisioning or replacing a print server is a one-time expense every few years. But what about the ongoing costs of print servers? What do those costs look like?

Around 80% of these customers reported that print servers required between $1,000 and $3,000 each year to operate and maintain. The number of respondents that recorded higher costs of operation were smaller but still significant: A full 20% said that each print server cost them more than $3,000 annually to operate and maintain, with 8% citing annual costs greater than $5,000.

Even in a very conservative scenario of around $1,500 per provisioned print server and $1,500 in annual operating costs, most organizations would be looking at about $9,000 in provisioning and operating expenses for each print server per five-year cycle, assuming a fairly generous lifespan. Now multiply that by each print server in your organization and factor in some additional real-world overhead for eventualities like early hardware failures, redundancy and extra licensing.

Once you’ve arrived at that figure, imagine what saving that amount could do to your budget.

No, that’s not an idle thought exercise. PrinterLogic can actually eliminate these costs by eliminating print servers altogether. Best of all, there’s no hidden compromise. Your organization will actually gain printing functionality and ease of administration that are far superior to any print management scenario that is possible with print servers. PrinterLogic achieves that through:

• Centralized printer management: PrinterLogic leverages proven direct IP printing so that you can administer printers across the enterprise using a single web-based console. You can effortlessly create, batch edit, set defaults or quickly remove those printers with unprecedented precision and ease. The same goes for drivers and profiles.
• Self-service installation: Our intuitive and consistent web-based portal empowers your end users with the ability to identify, select and install their own printers. Optional floorplan maps make it even easier.
• Automated printer deployment: Dynamically deploy the right printers to the rights users based on a host of criteria (e.g., Active Directory user, computer, group, hostname, IP address) – all without complicated group policy objects (GPOs) or scripts. And even in virtual environments like Citrix and VMware.

But PrinterLogic doesn’t just eliminate print server costs. The combined benefits above drastically reduce the number of service desk calls and minimize the time investment needed to maintain your print environment. That could be why so many PrinterLogic customers also reported return on investment (ROI) greater than 200% in separate TechValidate surveys!

Posted by Andrew Miller

You’ve come to a crossroads. It’s time to upgrade part or all of your print architecture, and you need to decide whether to migrate your print server—maybe using something along the lines of a print server migration wizard or a file and print server migration tool—or take the bold step of eliminating your print server altogether.

Let me be the first to reassure you: Eliminating print servers from your print environment isn’t as scary as you might think. In light of all the things that can possibly go wrong when you migrate your print server, not to mention all the hassle it involves (even when using something supposedly “automated” like a print server migration wizard), print server elimination starts to look like the simpler and quicker of the two options. When you factor in the long-term time and cost savings of elimination on top of that, it’s a wonder that anyone would consider migration in the first place.

At PrinterLogic, our print management solution has garnered a reputation for eliminating print servers from environments that never thought they could function without them. Many of our customers were in the same boat as you at the start: Migrate our print server or eliminate it? And many of them were amazed to find that they could not only eliminate them outright, but that PrinterLogic could be deployed in as little as a day or two, even in large distributed organizations.

Before you drop tens of thousands of dollars on new servers and licensing, then fire up the file and print server migration tool and prepare for the long, arduous process of transferring all the existing settings, drivers, profiles, and so on from the old hardware to the new, consider what PrinterLogic adds to your print environment—and what it takes away.

What it brings:

• Centralized administration. Automatically deploy and effortlessly manage printers and drivers across the enterprise from a single pane of glass—without the need for group policy objects or scripts (GPOs).
• Seamless Citrix/VMware integration. Not only does PrinterLogic leverage the strengths of virtual environments, it addresses their Achilles heel: enterprise printing. You’ll enjoy centralized administration along with features like print job compression and driverless printing.
• Self-service printer installation. Through PrinterLogic’s intuitive portal, empowered end users will easily be able to install printers themselves, saving them (and you) a call to the service desk.

What it takes away:

• Print servers! Never have to deal with one of these counterproductive print management dinosaurs again. When you get rid of print servers, you get rid of their licensing fees, their ongoing costs of maintenance and upgrade, the extra software like antivirus programs, their unreliability, and all the hassle that comes with trying to manage them.
• Print-related WAN traffic. PrinterLogic’s direct IP foundation allows your end users to print directly from endpoint devices to the network printers. That frees up WAN bandwidth and speeds up the network.

And that’s only a tiny sampling of PrinterLogic’s benefits. So put the print server migration wizard away for good, forget about trying to migrate your print server, and implement PrinterLogic instead. It will import all your current printers, drivers, and profiles more reliably and efficiently than any migration tool, and in the end you’ll be free of print servers too.

Posted by Devin Anderson

Time, as we all know very well, is money. And if you’re using a virtual solution like VMware, you’re aware that speed isn’t one of its strong suits. VMware printing in particular can be a huge productivity bottleneck. So when you tally all the hours your end users have spent waiting for documents to print, you can see the negative effect it might have on your organization’s bottom line.

Given the very nature of virtual environments, any number of issues can be at the root of slow printing in VMware View. One of the big reasons is that virtual environments aren’t always able to deliver the targeted deployments you need. Any user on the server could end up being associated with a printer based on a broad set of criteria—a lack of precision than can prove especially problematic in large and distributed environments. Fluid, fast and reliable enterprise printing requires the perfect alignment of workstation, driver and printer. Anything less can result in painfully slow printing.

Another potential cause of slow VMware printing is the high WAN overhead that’s needed to relay print jobs to the endpoint device. The shortest—and quickest—route between two points is always a direct one, so when print jobs are forced to ping-pong between multiple nodes across the virtual network, delays are pretty much inevitable. Not to mention the fact that the print jobs themselves can be data-heavy. As they travel over the WAN and back to reach the endpoint device (which might be located just a few feet from the end user), they consume a disproportionate amount of a precious finite resource: bandwidth. That doesn’t just mean slow printing in VMware. That means overall network performance takes a hit.

If your VMware View printing is slow, the usual tweaks and optimizations will only take you so far. You actually need to look beyond VMware for a solution. But you also have to make sure that you’re not adding another layer of software or hardware that could complicate your print environment and potentially introduce more problems.

PrinterLogic is a print management solution that integrates seamlessly with virtual environments like VMware. It addresses the issues at the heart of slow VMware printing—and many other issues besides—to ensure that the right users get the right printer every single time. These targeted deployments are possible because PrinterLogic identifies the physical location of your VMware users and then delivers both drivers and printers based on universal criteria such as Active Directory (AD) user, group, organizational unit (OU), proximity to certain printers, or hardware identifiers like MAC addresses. Even if VMware users roam during a session, PrinterLogic can dynamically remove and reassign printers as their location changes.

What’s more, PrinterLogic leverages direct IP technology to relay those jobs to endpoint devices with incredible speed. And it does all this without the need for time-consuming configuration and finicky driver management. In fact, PrinterLogic’s greatest strength is its simplicity. Through far-reaching features like centralized administration, self-service printer installation and automatic printer deployment, PrinterLogic streamlines routine print management and does away with clunky rights management protocols like group policy objects (GPOs) for even more performance-boosting benefits.

By implementing PrinterLogic to solve slow printing in VMware View, it’s possible for you to achieve an unprecedented level of speed, reliability and efficiency throughout your organization’s print environment. Contact us today—The ROI alone will show you how much time you’re saving.

Posted by Devin Anderson

Organizations everywhere are discovering the benefits of email to print—a wonderfully simple solution to the challenges of today’s enterprise print environments, which include large numbers of mobile users and device heterogeneity. With email to print (also known as print to email), users can easily add files to an email message and then send the message to a specific address, where it will then enter the print queue of a network printer just like any other print job.

The advantages of email to print are many. There are no drivers to install, no complicated logins and authorization processes, no printers to map. Even the most inexperienced users can print from email; and what’s more, it can be done anywhere within the organization or outside of it, so even home users have the convenient ability print their reports, presentations, and other essential documents to in-house printers.

But there are two caveats about email to print that might have already crossed your mind. First, how do you implement this kind of functionality in a controlled, uniform way throughout your organization? And second, given the ease of simply emailing documents to have them printed, how can you print from email in a way that’s secure?

PrinterLogic addresses both of these concerns in one fell swoop with its Mobile Printing solution. For starters, PrinterLogic integrates seamlessly with your existing print environment. It can be deployed enterprise-wide (sometimes in as little as a single day) to give you unprecedented administrative control over all your printers together with incredible ease of use. Your IT team will be able to manage printers and drivers anywhere in the organization from a single pane of glass. And your end users will experience the benefits of reliable automated printer deployment, self-service installation, and much, much more.

With PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing in place, your users will then enjoy email to print capabilities. All they have to do is send files to a printer’s dedicated email address and they will immediately be printed. Mobile and BYOD users won’t have to call the support desk and ask for help installing drivers. They’ll be able to print from email on any device that has a mail client, no matter whether it’s iOS, Android or a Chromebook. Plus they’ll be able to email to print using any network printer, including legacy devices.

As for security, that’s where PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing really sets itself apart. With our email to print capabilities, you have total control over which users can print and to which printers (just knowing the email address doesn’t necessarily allow a user to print to email). You can set quotas for how much users are able to print from email, what kind of file types they can print, or even limit printer functionality to double-sided or black-and-white printing. You’ll also be able to equip your end users with printer-specific release printing, which enables them to release a print job to a particular printer right from their mobile device.

Thanks to features like these coupled with its phenomenal enterprise print management, PrinterLogic is the easiest way to enhance your company’s email to print capabilities.