Print Tracking Software from PrinterLogic

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Posted by Devin Anderson

We’re living in the age of Big Data. While that data helps us make more informed decisions and deliver targeted solutions to longstanding problems, it’s not without its problems.

To begin with, there’s the matter of its acquisition: How do you gather the most comprehensive, useful data in the first place—and in a manner that doesn’t inconvenience the individual user? And then there’s making sense of all that information: Once the data is collected, how can you organize and present in a way that has value?

Print tracking is one method of collecting essential information about your organization. Tracking printer usage can help you determine if consumables (e.g., paper, toner) are being squandered in various branches or departments, which printers are approaching the end of their lifespan, or identify the end users that are placing the heaviest demands on their local printers. By extension, print tracking can help you allocate resources accordingly and even shave significant costs off your IT budget.

Without the right printer tracking software, however, any attempt to track printer usage might not be very fruitful. Why? Because a lot of what claims to be printer tracking software falls short on one or both of the counts mentioned above: Either it doesn’t offer enterprise-wide, unobtrusive data collection or it fails to process and present that data in a comprehensible way. Partial or unclear print tracking data is just as bad as no data at all.

Bearing those two typical shortcomings in mind, PrinterLogic’s printer tracking software was designed to be comprehensive and above all useful, providing you with strong, reliable, coherent data on which to base the kinds of cost- and resource-saving decisions that can have a profound effect on your print environment as well as your organization as a whole.

PrinterLogic’s printer tracking software is available in the form of its Print Job Auditing module. This module integrates seamlessly with your existing print environment to give intuitive macro- and micro-level views onto printing activity and costs. Some of its data points to track printer usage of both network and USB printers include:

  • Date and time print jobs were executed
  • Name, job title, manager, department and computer of initiating user
  • Print job details such as color or grayscale printing, duplexing and document name

PrinterLogic’s printer tracking software generates intuitive reports from these print tracking data points. You can even have these reports automatically emailed to department or branch managers on a regular basis to encourage efficiency initiatives.

And with access to these print tracking data points, you can also link the costs of printing in your organization to real-world usage. By arranging the resulting statistics according to timeframe, department, user or printer, you’ll be able to identify:

  • Your organization’s top 10, 100 or 500 printer users
  • The names of documents printed on a particular printer at a specified time
  • The terminals or users that frequently initiate large or color print jobs
  • How many pages any given printer is outputting over weekly, monthly or quarterly periods

By using PrinterLogic’s Print Auditing module to track printer usage across your organization and create understandable reports, printing activity and costs like these are no longer mysteries—they’re facts you can act on.

Managing Your Print Environment Across Multiple Locations

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If your organization has multiple locations and relies on print servers, the chances are good that your printing environment resembles one of two scenarios:

  1. A centralized print server at the main location that services all branch locations.
  2. Local print servers at each of the branch locations.

The first printing environment makes it a bit easier to manage printing because all print functionality is consolidated and routed through the central print server—which is generally close to where the primary IT management team is based. But it also introduces several vulnerabilities, chief among them being the WAN connection.

With a centralized print server, any print jobs initiated at remote branches have to first travel across the WAN to the central print server, then back across the WAN to the local printer. If this WAN link fails for any reason during that round trip, so does that print job. Even during day-to-day printing, the overtaxed WAN link can result in sluggish print jobs. The centralized server also introduces a single point of failure throughout the entire printing environment. When that print server goes down, the whole enterprise print environment does too. That can be addressed in part through redundancy, but redundancy is expensive and comes with its own management headaches.

In the second type of printing environment, the vulnerabilities are fewer, but it’s no longer as easy to manage printing across the enterprise. In fact, it’s downright difficult. That’s because having discrete print servers at each location creates fragmentation. This in turn reduces the transparency of the company-wide printing environment and multiplies the burden on the technical and support staff. Instead of dealing with the maintenance and management of a single printing environment, they now have to deal with what are effectively several micro-environments, each with its own distinct needs.

To manage printing in any kind of distributed printing environment without the drawbacks of a centralized print server or multi-site servers, there’s PrinterLogic. Our on-premise print management solution delivers unprecedented flexibility while giving you greater control over your whole printing environment.

How exactly? Well, for starters, PrinterLogic allows you to manage printing anywhere in your organization from a single pane of glass. Using our intuitive web-based administration panel, you can easily deploy printers and drivers to end users in remote sites from a central console in the main location – manually or automatically, all without group policy objects (GPOs) or scripts. From this same console you can also alter printer settings, remove printers, and edit driver profiles. It doesn’t matter if your headquarters is in Tulsa and the remote site is in Saskatchewan. It’s straightforward and consistent to manage printing with PrinterLogic.

PrinterLogic makes it easier on your support staff too. By providing an accessible self-service portal for end users, our next-gen print management solution allows them to easily identify and install nearby printers on their own. There’s no need for them to call the service desk, because now printers can be installed with a single click in any printing environment. There’s even an option to upload floorplan maps to make it easier for them to visually locate their desired printers. This feature is incredibly useful for roaming employees who travel between headquarters and remote sites.

There’s no doubt that multiple locations present several hurdles when you’re looking to manage printing across distributed printing environments. But PrinterLogic’s enterprise printing solution allows you to sail over those hurdles with incredible ease.

Increase Efficiency While Decreasing Enterprise Print Management Costs

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Posted by Andrew Miller

Traditionally, enterprise print management has been both expensive and resource-intensive. This generally stems from the use of print servers, which have been the default enterprise printing solution for many organizations across the world. Although print servers are typically deployed to accommodate large, disparate, or growing print environments, they can actually reduce the efficiency of enterprise printing—while simultaneously requiring ongoing costs of maintenance, operation, upgrade and replacement.

How exactly do print servers reduce enterprise printing efficiency? Here are just a few common ways:

  • Poor driver management
  • Cumbersome printer deployment through group policy objects (GPOs) and scripts
  • Lack of convenient centralized administration
  • Little emphasis on ease of use (for admins or end users)
  • Increased vulnerability through single points of failure

PrinterLogic is an enterprise printing solution that addresses all of these shortcomings and many more, resulting in more efficient enterprise printing in any kind of environment: large or small, conventional or virtual, consolidated or distributed. That in turn leads to reduced enterprise print management costs both in the short- and long-term.

Let’s take printer installation as an example. In most cases, end users who need to have a printer installed will have to call the service desk for assistance. Maybe it’s because the end user is unable to locate the correct device from the available printers. Maybe it’s because the desired printer hasn’t actually been deployed to the end user because of some GPO or scripting issue. Maybe it’s because the end user isn’t authorized to perform the installation process or is confused by the steps involved. Whatever the reason, this means the end user has to take time out of his or her workday to call the service desk, and the service desk technician has to spend time troubleshooting or conducting a walkthrough over the phone. Now multiply the frustration, inconvenience and lost productivity of this scenario by all the printer installations that take place each day in enterprise printing.

PrinterLogic’s solution to this is a ubiquitous self-service portal that allows end users to easily locate, identify and install printers themselves with just one click. This way, the end user can perform a routine printer installation him- or herself in seconds. This saves both the end user and the service desk technician from having to waste time on the phone. That equates to more efficient enterprise print management and uninterrupted productivity, two factors that directly impact an organization’s bottom line.

And that’s just one demonstration of how PrinterLogic streamlines enterprise printing to cut down the costs of enterprise print management. Some others include:

  • Reduced WAN load: PrinterLogic establishes direct IP connections between endpoint devices and local printers. This avoids sending print-related traffic across the WAN, which speeds up enterprise printing and frees up bandwidth for all the other vital network-reliant services.
  • Increased reliability: With PrinterLogic, enterprise printing continues even in the event of a WAN outage or a host server failure. Unlike print servers, it’s also robust toward driver conflicts, so you don’t suffer downtime because of 32- and 64-bit driver confusion.
  • Centralized administration: Enterprise print management is practically effortless with PrinterLogic’s consistent, easy-to-use web-based management console.

PrinterLogic doesn’t make increased efficiency and decreased enterprise print management costs an either/or proposition. Your organization gets to experience both through a single enterprise printing solution.

Print Infrastructure Optimization

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Posted by Devin Anderson

After dealing with print servers as their default print management solution for far too long, more and more organizations are turning to print infrastructure optimization to cut ongoing costs, reduce their IT footprint, streamline their print environment and make print management more efficient. It’s a step that many mid- and large-scale organizations might have found too daunting or even impossible to take in the not-too-distant past. But forward-thinking print management solutions like PrinterLogic are making the transition easy and fast, so organizations like yours can start enjoying the benefits of print infrastructure optimization right away.

Currently, the major focus of print infrastructure optimization rests on eliminating print servers. It’s not hard to see why. Finicky, unreliable, and ultimately costly to maintain, print servers are a stopgap solution to print environment expansion that somehow became a permanent fixture of many IT backbones. Far from simplifying enterprise print management, they actually increase the demands on administration because of their inherent lack of robustness, their vulnerability to driver conflicts, their limitations to deployment and management, their inability to meet the demands of the modern mobile workplace, and their disregard for the end user.

These classic print server deficiencies are the areas where PrinterLogic shines. And, in line with the aims of print infrastructure optimization, PrinterLogic accomplishes far more with a smaller footprint.

PrinterLogic optimizes your print infrastructure in the following ways:

  • Centralized administration: Manage printers and their drivers from a single consistent web-based console from anywhere in the organization. Deploy new or existing printers to targeted users or groups without resorting to group policy objects (GPOs) or scripts. Make real-time changes to assignments or default printing options with just a click. This consolidation of control is key to true print infrastructure optimization.
  • Support for mobile, BYOD, guest and secure printing: Success for any enterprise lies in adapting to the rapid pace of consumer and corporate technology. PrinterLogic allows your print environment to remain nimble and secure—even in diverse, globally distributed organizations—through its Mobile Printing and Pull Printing modules. Not only are both of these features easy to implement and configure, your end users will find them simple and intuitive.
  • Incredible ease and speed of deployment: PrinterLogic was designed for smooth, speedy roll-outs in a wide variety of print environments. And our customers will attest to this: In an independent survey, more than 97% of respondents rated PrinterLogic’s ease and speed of deployment as “great” or better. Large, complex organizations have reported PrinterLogic deployments that took one business day. This enables you to begin recouping return on investment (ROI) through cost and resource savings almost immediately.
  • End user empowerment: Through its self-service installation portal, PrinterLogic empowers your end users with the ability to identify and install their own printers with a single click – no matter where in the organization they happen to be. Optional floorplan maps make it even easier for them to locate printers visually. This saves time and has been shown to drastically reduce the burden on IT, making it one of the clearest and most useful day-to-day benefits of print infrastructure optimization.

By eliminating print servers while introducing increased functionality and ease of use into your print environment, PrinterLogic’s powerful print management solution puts print infrastructure optimization within reach of any organization, regardless of size, industry, or existing IT requirements.