Print management and print server management aren’t one and the same, although it’s surprising how many organizations tend to assume that the two are inextricably linked. Print management is about administering your organization’s entire print environment—installing printers, deploying drivers, overseeing printing activity and queues, and so forth.

Print server management, on the other hand, is a time-consuming subset of print management that primarily involves trying to keep a print server up and running or reliably performing its basic functions. The reason print server management is so resource intensive is because print servers have a number of deficiencies that actually complicate the broader process of print management.

But how can you identify and deal with those deficiencies? Here are some clues.

Slow printing and downtime: In distributed print environments with a centralized infrastructure, slow printing can be a telltale sign of a print server deficiency. What happens is that the WAN link, so crucial to print functionality, is overtaxed. Because all print jobs first need to travel to the central print server (via the WAN) then back to the local printer (again via the WAN), this can create a chokepoint during periods of heavy printing and Internet usage.

The first sign of slow printing will be frustrated end users! Some of those end users might suffer in silence, but it’s more likely that they will call the service desk to report the problem, which often results in the support team wasting time fielding calls instead of dealing with the root cause. Although stopgap solutions like WAN accelerators might help speed up network traffic, they won’t address this underlying deficiency of print servers—nor can they prevent the organization-wide printing downtime that results when the central print server crashes.

Driver conflicts: If you’ve ever encountered driver issues, especially with regard to 32- and 64-bit incompatibilities, you’ve come across yet another print server deficiency. One of the headaches of print server management is dealing with different versions of the same driver and ensuring that they aren’t mistakenly deployed to incompatible clients when new printers are installed.

These driver issues are a perfect example of print server management adding extra hassle to print management in general. Over the years print servers have tried to avoid this confusion and put additional compatibility safeguards in place, but the fact remains that different driver versions and print servers rarely play well together.

Print-related service desk calls: Regular print-related calls to the service desk are a sure sign of a print server deficiency—although which deficiency in particular can be hard to pin down. It could be because an end user is unable to locate a printer or is having trouble installing one. Or it could be due to one of the many routine print server management problems: stuck print jobs, improperly deployed printers or drivers, hangs, you name it.

The easiest way to eliminate these print server deficiencies is to eliminate print servers outright. PrinterLogic makes that possible. Our tried-and-tested software solution removes the persistent, time-consuming problem (and cost) of print server management and gives you straightforward, streamlined print management for your entire organization with incredible features like enterprise-wide print administration from a single pane of glass, effortless printer and driver deployment, self-service installation for end users, and tons more. Why struggle with print server management when you can simply have print management instead?

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.

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.

Ever since the widespread migration from 32- to 64-bit platforms began—and with it the migration from 32-bit printer drivers to 64-bit printer drivers—there have been lingering compatibility problems. In most areas, incompatibility between 32- and 64-bit architectures has gradually resolved itself as 64-bit solutions have become available and 32-bit environments have been phased out over time. When it comes to printing, however, there are still many organizations who continue to struggle with the inability to use 32-bit printer drivers on 64-bit computers and vice versa.

The hard and fast rule is that 64-bit printer drivers cannot be used on 32-bit systems, and 32-bit printer drivers cannot be used on 64-bit platforms. Simple enough. But when you have a mixed 32-/64-bit environment and 32-bit and 64-bit printer drivers existing side by side, that can be a recipe for confusion. Even though newer print server platforms have responded to longstanding complaints about driver conflicts by offering improved driver support, there are continued problems with, for example, 32-bit printer drivers accidentally being deployed to 64-bit clients. This can cause printing downtime for individual end users, who then have to call the service desk to sort things out.

And because print servers have never been very robust in terms of driver management, these issues are more than just isolated individual cases. When two different versions of the same driver (meaning the 64-bit printer driver version and the 32-bit one) are forced to coexist in a single print environment, it can lead to conflicts that cause widespread downtime on account of print spooler issues, which also have 32- and 64-bit versions.

End users who can’t print as a result of server downtime are rarely happy end users. They also have very little sympathy when your service desk technician explains the intricacies behind trying to use a 32-bit printer driver on a 64-bit computer.

Thanks to its powerful driver management, PrinterLogic enables your organization to avoid printing downtime (and unhappy end users) by avoiding conflicts between 32-bit printer drivers and 64-bit printer drivers – not to mention more general driver conflicts between printer models, manufacturers and operating systems. Its central repository provides you with a single destination to upload new drivers, update existing ones and disable or delete those no longer in use. Even in virtual environments like Citrix and VMware. From here you can deploy drivers to clients enterprise wide, selectively or en masse. This simple but granular administration allows you to reliably associate 32-bit and 64-bit printer drivers with their respective client devices and platforms, so there’s never a risk of driver incompatibility and downtime.

Along with its incredible driver management, PrinterLogic’s management console allows you to customize profiles in a detailed way. With a few simple clicks you can configure driver settings such as DPI, duplexing, paper size, paper tray and color or black-and-white printing for individual end users or entire client pools. What’s more, you can leverage PrinterLogic’s universal driver support to ensure broad compatibility in heterogeneous environments that use a mix of operating systems and architectures.

PrinterLogic’s flexible yet robust print management solution removes the uncertainty and confusion from print environments that continue to maintain 64- and 32-bit printer drivers alongside one another. In doing so, it ensures the high availability of printing services across the enterprise. That won’t just make your end users happy. It will delight your service desk team too.