How to Decrease Your Print Server Downtime

Posted by Andrew Miller

Print server downtime is a fact of life for organizations that continue to rely on traditional print management solutions. If you absolutely want or need to keep your print servers in place, there are a few things you can do to decrease downtime. There’s also another option—eliminating your print servers altogether—that PrinterLogic’s print management solution makes possible.

But first things first: decreasing your downtime with conventional print server solutions.

Before doing anything else, you need to create redundancy. This means having a backup print server at the ready if and when the primary server crashes or drops offline. Best print server management practices actually call for two standby servers in high-volume environments or in organizations where printing is mission critical. The catch is that each of these backup servers has to be maintained—even when not in everyday use. If they haven’t been patched with the latest software upgrades or are working with outdated drivers, they could end up causing a whole different set of printing problems if they’re suddenly called into service. The cost of procuring and maintaining the hardware and extra licensing for redundant print server solutions can also get pricey.

Driver conflicts and incompatibilities are the cause of many print server crashes, which is why it’s also important to make sure your drivers are up to date and thoroughly tested. This can be hard to do in organizations that use a variety of device models and manufacturers, but the many hours of extra effort that it takes to test and update drivers using standard print server management options could potentially save your workplace from hours of print server downtime.

Finally, you’ll want to consolidate. Distributed organizations often like to scatter print servers across their remote locations. That has some obvious benefits, but it also makes it harder for a centrally located IT team to troubleshoot a print server and bring it back online after it’s crashed. By consolidating (and, of course, adding multiple print server backups for redundancy), you make print server management easier in routine situations as well as emergencies. Unfortunately, consolidation does trade print server solutions’ single points of failure for another vulnerability: the WAN link. When the WAN goes down, it cuts the connection to the central print server and risks taking printing down with it.

The easiest way to reduce your print server downtime is to eliminate them completely. That’s what PrinterLogic is for. Our next-gen print management software can completely replace the functionality of print server solutions while introducing more features, more stability and more efficiency into your print environment.

With PrinterLogic, not only do you get centralized print management that puts print server management to shame, you also get rock-solid stability that allows your end users to keep printing as normal, even in the event of a server failure or a WAN outage. That’s because PrinterLogic is built on proven direct IP printing technology that establishes direct links between clients and printers.

Furthermore, unlike cumbersome print server management, PrinterLogic lets you deploy printers accurately and reliably — without having to use group policy objects (GPOs) and complex scripts. That means your end users don’t experience printing downtime when a printer fails to deploy properly. They get the right printers at the right time. Every time.

And PrinterLogic can seamlessly integrate into environments that have traditionally been associated with print server solutions, such as EMR (Epic, MEDITECH) or virtual (CitrixVMware) environments. So whether you keep your existing print servers or use PrinterLogic to eliminate them for good, you’ll get the unprecedented availability you’re looking for and many other features to boot.

VDI Printing Doesn’t Have to Be So Hard

There’s a common assumption that printing in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments is destined to be difficult. It’s not just that VDI printing is inherently slow, it’s that the same fundamental VDI printing problems never really seem to go away. I’m talking about persistent VDI printing issues such as:

  • Reliably deploying and installing printers
  • Driver incompatibilities
  • Limited access to full printer features
  • “Forgetting” default printing settings

Regardless of whether your organization uses Citrix, VMware or another VDI solution, you’ve probably encountered one or more of these VDI printing issues. It just goes with the territory, right?

It doesn’t have to. PrinterLogic’s enterprise print management solution seamlessly integrates with any VDI solution, including Citrix and VMware, to provide the rock-solid printing, effortless management and reliable installation that are so often missing from VDI print environments.

In VMware environments, for example, PrinterLogic solves the usual VDI printing problems by introducing its renowned automated deployment, centralized management and self-service portal features. Automated deployment enables admins to deliver printers to VMware users based on their location using specific criteria like Active Directory (AD) user, group, organizational unit, IP address range and more – all without resorting to complex hierarchical group policy objects (GPOs). Centralized management overcomes many VDI printing issues by allowing admins to create, edit and remove printers anywhere in the organization from a single pane of glass. And PrinterLogic’s self-service portal empowers end users with the ability to identify and install nearby printers themselves without having to call the service desk.

The same is true for Citrix environments. In fact, PrinterLogic lets you choose between using the Citrix Universal Printer, Citrix auto-created printers and Citrix session printers. Each addresses VDI printing issues in different ways, so you can use the method that best suits your organization. Available features include driverless printing to ensure greater compatibility, utilizing native print job compression, or implementing PrinterLogic’s easy proximity printing functionality.

And if you’re frustrated by customarily sluggish VDI printing, PrinterLogic can speed that up, too, without having to resort to expensive technologies like WAN accelerators. Because PrinterLogic leverages direct IP printing technology, it avoids the back-and-forth WAN traffic that makes VDI printing slow. By freeing up print-related WAN bandwidth, it also has the potential to make the remote sessions more responsive ­– especially on throughput-constrained networks.

PrinterLogic also helps VDI organizations further pare down their infrastructure. Despite its ability to address so many recurring VDI printing problems, our next-gen print management solution has a remarkably small consolidated footprint. With a single instance of PrinterLogic, you can start eliminating print servers and all the headache and expense that goes along with them without sacrificing any of the functionality they provide.

So throw conventional wisdom aside and say goodbye to your ongoing VDI printing issues. PrinterLogic is the proof that VDI printing doesn’t have to be so hard.

How to Ensure High Print Availability for All Mobile Devices

Posted by Devin Anderson

Now that we’re well into the mobile computing era, our standards have changed. Just a few years ago, we might have accepted compromises when it came to network access, app functionality, or print availability on mobile devices. Not anymore. From C-suite executives all the way down to fresh-faced interns, mobile end users expect all the features and availability that traditional hardwired environments have offered. That includes enterprise-grade printing from mobile devices.

This naturally poses a challenge for organizations. Until now, there hasn’t been a cost-effective, user-friendly way to implement enterprise mobile printing. Solutions like Google Cloud Print and AirPrint have attempted to bridge the gap, but they require devices that support their proprietary functionality. That means either replacing your existing printer fleet or limiting mobile device printing to select printers. Obviously, neither of those is ideal. The first case requires considerable expense to guarantee high availability when printing from mobile devices, whereas the second actually restricts availability.

Typically, one of the further drawbacks of alternative enterprise mobile printing solutions has been special software clients or apps that need to be installed on the mobile devices. The problem with this, of course, is that it is hard to ensure broad compatibility across multiple operating systems (and different versions thereof). For printing from mobile devices to work properly in this case, it’s also necessary to have smooth and reliable communication between the client and the printer—which is hard to guarantee in real-world scenarios that have so many variables.

PrinterLogic has an enterprise mobile printing solution that ensures high print availability while meeting considerations like practicality and cost. It’s called, simply enough, Mobile Printing, and it’s so versatile that organizations of any size, structure or sector can implement it in order to achieve intuitive, ubiquitous mobile device printing. It sidesteps many of the potential complications when printing from mobile devices and seamlessly integrates into any environment through three unique strengths:

  • There’s no software to install. Unlike lesser enterprise mobile printing solutions, PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing requires no client-side apps or similar software. Everything is handled directly by PrinterLogic’s print management solution.
  • It works with any device. It doesn’t matter whether your organization issues its own prescribed mobile devices or has a relaxed BYOD policy. Mobile Printing from PrinterLogic lets your users print from any mobile device.
  • It works with any printer. No need to abandon your legacy printers or restrict users to a small pool of expensive mobile-printing-capable printers. PrinterLogic enables mobile device printing to any network printer.

To print from their mobile devices, all users have to do is tap the “Share” button, then “Print,” and finally select a PrinterLogic printer as their print option. It’s that easy. They don’t have to struggle at all with downloading apps or installing new printers, which means that enterprise mobile printing functionality is available whenever they need it.

For BYOD users and guests, availability is just as high. Instead of tapping the “Share” button, mobile device printing takes place using proven email-to-print functionality. All these users have to do is acquire the dedicated email address for their desired printer and send their files to it. It then enters the queue just like any other print job.

It’s through this incredible simplicity that PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing delivers unprecedented print availability to all of your mobile and BYOD users. It’s the easiest and most robust way to implement enterprise mobile printing.

Common Cloud Printing Problems and Solutions

Posted by Jordan Pusey

Cloud printing solutions were supposed to introduce a new level of convenience to home and enterprise printing, but sometimes it feels like cloud printing has only put a fresh face on longstanding printing issues. In other words, for all their promise of a convenient, cable-less future, cloud printing problems continue to look an awful lot like conventional printing problems.

Here are some common cloud printing problems that you might have encountered in your organization, even when using turnkey solutions like Google Cloud Print or AirPrint:

  • Inability to print: As cloud printing problems go, this generic issue is the one that most closely resembles conventional issues—although that doesn’t make it any less frustrating. There are several possible root causes with as many troubleshooting paths. First, make sure that the initiating device is indeed cloud-print capable. Then, if using Google Cloud Print, check to see that the printer is registered correctly. Finally, using standard admin tools, determine whether or not the printer is having basic network connection problems. You might have to double check that the appropriate ports (usually 80, 8080, 5222 and 5353) are open and that your router is not blocking certain traffic.
  • The printer cannot be registered: This happens every so often with Google Cloud Print. The only solution is to complete the printer registration process again.
  • Removed/deleted/duplicate printers appearing: Here’s another cloud printing problem that isn’t all that different to conventional issues. Because cloud printing solutions require a chain of devices to authenticate and relay print jobs, it’s not unusual for “ghost” printers to be left behind if they haven’t been cleared from every link along the way. Make sure you’ve deleted unwanted printers from all affected devices and management consoles. With duplicate printers, it’s often best to delete both instances and then re-add them as if they were a fresh device.
  • Cloud print job hung in queue: Purge the print job from the queue and try again. Next, ensure that your firewall and other security measures are not blocking the connection to the printer. Also search for and execute any available printer firmware updates, as these can correct new or sudden incompatibilities.
  • Legacy devices not working: Unfortunately, although some cloud printing solutions do use various methods to deliver legacy support, they’re obviously designed to work best with printers that already have cloud printing functionality. The number of potential driver and hardware issues that could affect cloud printing with legacy devices is too vast to detail here. Suffice it to say, getting legacy devices to work seamlessly with cloud printing solutions usually comes down to luck.

As you can see, each of these common cloud printing problems has one or more possible solutions, which only adds to the time required for routine troubleshooting. For a single print management solution that provides cloud printing functionality without the customary shortcomings and roadblocks, there’s PrinterLogic.

PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing module enables all your end users—including contractors, freelancers, BYOD and mobile users, and guests—to easily print to any enabled printer no matter where they happen to be. Just as importantly, Mobile Printing supports any device and any printer, even legacy models, without the need to install any client software.

To print using Mobile Printing, all your mobile users have to do is tap the “Share” button on their mobile device or Chromebook, tap “Print,” and then select a PrinterLogic printer. Their job then enters the print queue like any other. For BYOD users and guests, they simply email the file to be printed to the dedicated printer email address you’ve provided. With either of these methods, admins can limit access to authorized users and lockdown file types and printer settings, providing complete control, oversight and security while avoiding the problems that bedevil other cloud printing solutions. On top of it all, you enjoy PrinterLogic’s renowned ease of management, resiliency, reduced footprint and flexibility!

Finally, SMBs Can Eliminate Print Servers Too

Posted by Devin Anderson

When we launched our PrinterLogic Web Stack (formerly Printer Installer) product more than three years ago, we had what turned out to be a revolutionary idea—that in order to minimize the print-related issues IT staff faced every day, enterprises would need to eliminate their print servers. We built an enterprise print management solution that did just that, and since then we’ve helped thousands of enterprises eliminate their print servers, reduce the complexity of print management and significantly cut their printing costs.

But over the years, one thing became abundantly clear. Larger enterprises aren’t the only ones who have to deal with the pains of business printing. Small and medium businesses—though they may not have the same number of printers, locations or servers to manage—still have incredibly complex print environments that require constant firefighting, which they don’t have time for.

SMB IT pros, just like their large enterprise counterparts, receive far too many print-related help desk calls, and they need a self-service printer installation tool that simplifies their users’ experiences, while still giving them full control. They need simple solutions to deploy printer drivers and manage printers. And as their companies grow, they find themselves in need of full-featured, enterprise-grade print management solutions. But these solutions are typically too complex, time consuming, and expensive for SMBs.

We didn’t think that was right.

So today we’ve introduced PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud), a Cloud-based print management solution purpose-built for SMBs who need quick, powerful control of their print environment without additional infrastructure. PrinterLogic SaaS brings the power of enterprise-grade print management—including printer driver deployment, centrally managed direct IP printing, print job auditing and reporting, and self-service printer installation—to SMBs, without the complexity and hassle. Click here to learn more about PrinterLogic SaaS.

So what can PrinterLogic SaaS enable for your organization? PrinterLogic SaaS simplifies print management and makes truly enterprise-grade capabilities accessible to everyone. This provides SMBs with:

Centralized Management

  • Print Queue Migration Tool
  • IP and Name Change Control
  • Driver change management
  • Printer Profile Enforcement

Printer Driver Deployment

  • Eliminate Scripting & GPO’s
  • Self-Service Installation Portal
  • Proximity Based Deployment
  • Active Directory & Hostname

Administration Controls

  • Print Queue Management
  • SNMP Monitoring and Alerts
  • Workstation Usage Records
  • Role Based Access Control

Advanced Management

  • Browser Based Secure Printing
  • Print Job Auditing and Costing
  • Data Manager & Mass Updates
  • Print & Server High Availability

Virtual Environment Support

  • Virtual Driver Management
  • Citrix Session Fat Clients
  • Citrix Session Zero Clients
  • Golden Image Deployment

As you can see, PrinterLogic SaaS offers enterprise-class print management to SMB IT professionals while still enabling you to eliminate print servers. It provides easy management with a simple interface, eliminates the need for scripting and GPOs, provides a self-service installation portal with floor plan maps and provides easy implementation that takes minutes, not weeks.

We’ve helped thousands of large enterprises eliminate their print servers, enhance their print management capabilities, and reduce costs. And we’re excited to be able to bring these benefits to SMBs in an efficient and cost-effective manner, too.

Give it a shot today—we think you’ll realize the benefits right away. And it costs nothing to get started, just visit www.printerlogic.com/printercloud and click “Start Trial.”

Enhance Your Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI) Printing Capabilities

Organizations that use virtual desktop interface (VDI) environments such as Citrix and VMware regularly cite VDI printing issues as the biggest downside of these virtual solutions. It’s easy to see why problems exist. There are a lot of moving parts to contend with in any VDI infrastructure, and there are usually just as many moving parts in most print infrastructures. Put the two together and you’ve created a situation where there are bound to be complex incompatibilities and issues that demand VDI printing solutions.

Unfortunately, most VDI printing solutions on the market today feel like bolted-on afterthoughts. Either they don’t mesh seamlessly with the VDI solution itself or they have an idiosyncratic workflow that trades ease of use for the resolution of a small number of the more glaring VDI printing issues.

At PrinterLogic, we don’t think VDI printing solutions have to be compromises. You can have a VDI printing solution that integrates seamlessly with your VDI environment and you can address all your VDI printing issues while enjoying greater ease of use. And the reason we’re so confident about this is because our next-generation enterprise print management solution is the proof.

Once you’ve implemented our print management solution (and its speed of deployment is incredible, by the way), you have three different options when it comes to provisioning printers in Citrix with PrinterLogic:

  1. With the Citrix Universal Printer: Use PrinterLogic to provision direct IP printers to the endpoint device, then print to the Citrix Universal Printer. This addresses VDI printing issues by allowing you to leverage driverless printing that even supports home-based printers. PrinterLogic also provides the simplified printer and driver administration that other VDI printing solutions lack.
  2. As Citrix auto-created printers: Use PrinterLogic to provision direct IP printers to the endpoint device, then use the Citrix auto-creation or redirection features. This has many of the same benefits as the Citrix Universal Printer above, including print job compression.
  3. As session printers: Use PrinterLogic to provision direct IP session printers. With this method, you get benefits like proximity (aka location-based) printing and the ability to deploy Citrix printers without using group policy objects (GPOs) or scripts, which alone will solve many VDI printing issues and other headaches. You can also take advantage of PrinterLogic’s self-service printer installation portal. It empowers end users to identify and install nearby printers with a single click.

This flexibility is one of the many areas where PrinterLogic shines relative to other VDI printing solutions. And when managing printers with PrinterLogic in VMware, its flexibility and feature set are similar:

  • Self-service printer installation: Routine printer installations can be performed quickly and easily by the end user—no service desk call necessary.
  • Location-based printing and automatic printer deployment: Get the right printers to the right users based on a whole host of static or dynamic criteria.
  • Superior print and driver management: Administer printer profiles and drivers for endpoint devices with unprecedented ease.
  • No rights management, faster logons: With PrinterLogic, there’s no need for GPOs or the scripts that slow login times. Plus network performance is faster because of its far more efficient WAN use and installation processes.

No matter which VDI environment you prefer, PrinterLogic bests other VDI printing solutions by virtue of its seamlessness and its ability to target the fundamental causes of VDI printing issues.

Is It Time to Rethink Your Corporate Print Environment?

Posted by Devin Anderson

Staying competitive means being innovative. And being innovative means having the willingness to rethink your organization’s current practices and identify ways in which they could be streamlined, improved or replaced altogether. That applies as much to your corporate print environment as it does to any other aspect of your organization.

Typically, corporate and enterprise printing tends to run on autopilot. This is often because it’s assumed that no cutting-edge developments have taken place to substantially improve corporate printing in recent years. Instead, if and when it comes time to update their print environment, organizations simply opt for a variation on a common theme—one that usually involves updating or consolidating print servers. It’s not necessarily cheaper or more efficient than the alternatives, but it is familiar.

Well, maybe it’s time to rethink corporate printing entirely.

At PrinterLogic, we know that print servers and traditional print management solutions are yesterday’s news. We’ve developed a next-generation enterprise printing solution that has the ability to eliminate print servers and patchwork software solutions completely. Yet, despite consolidating your print infrastructure and significantly reducing its footprint, our solution actually adds unprecedented flexibility and functionality to your print environment. There’s no tradeoff. Your print environment is simultaneously streamlined and enhanced.

How is such a thing possible in the complex world of corporate printing? The answer is in forward-thinking, field-tested engineering. You see, we’ve taken one of the most proven and reliable enterprise printing backbones—direct IP—and added powerful centralized management along with an architecture that’s both flexible and robust. That results in all the following advantages:

  • Simplified, centralized administration: Manage printers and drivers across the entire organization from a single pane of glass. Deploy new printers without having to rely on the group policy objects (GPOs) or scripts that make enterprise printing such a headache. Make individual or batch edits to printer settings and profiles with just a few clicks.
  • End-user empowerment: Using PrinterLogic’s acclaimed self-service portal, end users can easily identify and install nearby printers with a single click. No call to the service desk is necessary, saving time and hassle for them as well as your support staff.
  • Powerful enhancements: Conventional corporate printing is static. It needs to be dynamic. That’s why PrinterLogic offers optional Pull Printing and Mobile Printingmodules that introduce this powerful, trendsetting functionality into your print environment without any of the incompatibilities and workarounds required by many third-party solutions.
  • Seamless VDI support: Organizations with virtual desktop interface (VDI) environments frequently struggle with enterprise printing. PrinterLogic’s print management software supports Citrix printing and VMware printing with all the seamlessness of a native solution.
  • Unparalleled stability and reliability: Because PrinterLogic leverages direct IP printing, it removes the single points of failure commonly associated with traditional corporate printing solutions such as print servers. This means that end users can continue printing with no loss of core functionality in the rare event of a server outage. It also eliminates the dependency on the WAN in consolidated print environments, thereby increasing uptime and accelerating print times.

Simply put, PrinterLogic’s print management solution is ushering in a whole new era of enterprise printing. It’s lean, cost-effective, feature-rich, stable, secure and unbelievably scalable: everything you’d want from a print management solution. All you need to do is rethink what’s possible in corporate printing.

7 Unseen Costs in Corporate Printing

Corporate printing costs can be a lot like printers themselves. They’re there, always in the background, and you don’t really notice them until they start acting up or get out of control. This means that, in most corporate printing scenarios, there are a lot of unseen costs that could be weighing on your bottom line.

Before they can attempt to scurry back into hiding, let’s bring some of these corporate printing costs out into the open. For each item, we’ll also take a look at how PrinterLogic’s next-generation print management solution can help alleviate them.

  1. Printing hardware: Inexpensive printers and copiers have lower price tags upfront, but they could be adding to corporate printing costs over time because they generally require more maintenance and oversight.
    How PrinterLogic helps: Our print management solution maximizes your hardware investment by prolonging the useful life of legacy machines. Through PrinterLogic’s Pull Printing and Mobile Printing software modules, you can easily add next-gen features to your existing fleet.
  2. Power consumption: Laser printers and photocopiers are high-drain devices. Each time they print a job, their fuser needs to heat to the high temperature required to bind the toner to the paper. The energy required for this heating process can actually be more inefficient in low-use corporate printing scenarios.
    How PrinterLogic helps: PrinterLogic’s Print Auditing feature gives you detailed insight into individual and aggregate printer usage, so you can optimize placement of your high-drain devices according to actual printing behavior.
  3. Lack of infrastructure consolidation: Many organizations are operating with far more print infrastructure than they need, usually in the form of non-shared printers and multiple print servers. All those devices cost money to purchase, operate and maintain.
    How PrinterLogic helps: Our mantra is “eliminate print servers” for a reason. You can replace dozens or even hundreds of print servers with a single instance of PrinterLogic. Not only does that minimize the footprint of your corporate printing infrastructure, it also gives you proven reliability and availability that no amount of print servers can match.
  4. Printing supplies: Few accountants and IT professionals would count supplies among “unseen” corporate printing costs, but it’s surprising how many end users forget that things like paper, ink and toner cost money. Overuse is rife and doesn’t come cheap.
    How PrinterLogic helps: Once again, PrinterLogic’s Print Auditing module will enable you to pinpoint the heaviest usage by user, workstation or department. You can also easily restrict printing options such as color/monochrome or paper tray. This is why it’s not uncommon for our customers to report drops of 50% or more in consumable usage after installing PrinterLogic.
  5. Lost productivity: Downtime and lack of printing availability has a serious impact on your bottom line. That much is obvious. But it’s often hard to translate the hours that end users spend on the phone with the service desk or drumming their fingers while waiting for a print server to come back online into lost revenue, which makes its impact on corporate printing far less visible.
    How PrinterLogic helps: By allowing end users to install printers themselves with a single click and print without any loss of core functionality even in the event of a server outage, PrinterLogic introduces unprecedented standards of uptime and availability.
  6. Technical support: As with printing supplies, this cost doesn’t go “unseen” by IT experts. Yet many organizations consider technical support to be a fixed and inescapable segment of corporate printing costs.
    How PrinterLogic helps: When end users are spending less time calling the service desk for routine printer installations and technicians aren’t dealing with complex deployments and print server crashes, corporate printing support costs shrink to levels you thought were unattainable. PrinterLogic makes that possible.
  7. Print management: Another hard-to-pinpoint—if not quite invisible—cost in corporate printing is the time spent on print management. Setting up tricky deployments using group policy and updating (or rolling back) drivers in traditional print environments eats up vast amounts of time that could be spent on other IT-related tasks.
    How PrinterLogic helps: PrinterLogic’s centralized print management console gives admins precise control over printer and driver deployments—all without the need for group policy or scripts. It’s even possible to make individual or batch profile changes by simply checking a box. No wonder so many of our customers have reduced time spent on print management by 30% or more by using PrinterLogic.

PrinterLogic’s print management solution gets to the root cause of “unseen” corporate printing costs, allowing your organization to reduce the time, money, resources and infrastructure necessary to operate an efficient, reliable and versatile enterprise print environment. And those savings will definitely be visible in your bottom line.

Are Too Many Drivers Hosted on Your Print Server?

Posted by Jordan Pusey

Digital clutter is no different to physical clutter. At the very least, it hinders efficiency. At its worst, it can cause serious complications. In the realm of print server management, too many drivers cluttering a repository can result in software conflicts, user confusion and background processes that hog resources. That’s why eliminating unnecessary drivers is considered best practice in print server management.

How can you tell if there are too many drivers hosted on your print server? First, there’s the simple sight method. Take a look at your driver repository and determine how many of those drivers are actually in active use and how many are remnants of legacy machines you replaced long ago, how many were simply swept up in past print server migrations, and how many are outdated versions you’ve kept for rollback purposes. With all the day-to-day busyness that print server management involves, sometimes it’s easy to forget to do the necessary housekeeping.

Next, consider performance. Are jobs taking forever to spool? Are users complaining of a long delay between clicking “Print” and actually getting their print jobs? Is your print server crashing or hanging more than usual? That could be a sign that the monitoring services that (often very poorly coded) drivers typically install are getting out of hand. Even when you uninstall those drivers, they tend to leave their monitoring services behind. Sluggish print server performance is a key indicator that this monitoring software is building up or that there are too many drivers for the print servers to handle comfortably in high-volume print environments. Proper print server configuration and a proactive approach to driver management can help alleviate some of these performance problems.

Finally, examine the end-user experience. If end users are encountering basic issues like failed printer installations and printing errors, there’s a good chance that too many drivers are hosted on the print server and are causing conflicts—especially in mixed 32-bit and 64-bit environments. Provided you’re able to absorb the additional costs of hardware and management, a print server configuration that puts 32-bit drivers on one server and 64-bit drivers on another could prevent some of these driver conflicts from occurring. In other cases, standardizing drivers or switching to universal printer drivers might be the best solution.

Print server migration is a great opportunity to begin sorting through the clutter in your driver repository. The upgrade and migration process gives you the chance to review your existing setup and start somewhat fresh. However, it might make sense to avoid automated print server migration tools, as these make it all too easy to transfer even the messier aspects of your existing print server configuration. In the name of saving time, you could end up with a brand new server that has just as much clutter as the old one. And that will only cause the same problems down the road.

Instead of engaging in the long, expensive process of print server migration or wasting hours trying to tweak your print server configuration, why not do away with print server management altogether? PrinterLogic’s next-generation print management solution allows you to eliminate print servers completely while actually gaining functionality.

PrinterLogic’s centralized administration console lets you manage printers as well as drivers from a single pane of glass anywhere in the organization, making it easy to clean up your repository, disable or completely remove drivers with a click, and avoid the accumulation of legacy drivers.

Take Advantage of Our Citrix Printing Solutions

Citrix printing is no walk in the park—and neither is finding the right Citrix printing solution for your environment. We hear that time and again from IT professionals who’ve spent untold hours troubleshooting Citrix printer installations or struggling with managing Citrix drivers. And not only do they say that Citrix printing problems like these are a frequent occurrence, they know from speaking with colleagues that they’re not alone in that experience. Despite the incremental addition of requested features like auto printer creation, the Citrix Universal Print Server (UPS), and session-based printing over the years, Citrix printing has been and remains one of the most frustrating aspects of this otherwise powerful and scalable virtual desktop solution.

Yet there’s hope. As more and more organizations are discovering, PrinterLogic provides a cost-effective, next-generation enterprise print management solution that does what frustrated system admins have thought was impossible: It restores control, stability, and ease of use to seemingly unmanageable Citrix printing scenarios. Best of all, it integrates seamlessly with the wider Citrix environment, so it functions as smoothly and as intuitively as a native solution. Simply put, PrinterLogic and Citrix are an ideal match.

Most importantly, PrinterLogic doesn’t force you to adopt a certain method of Citrix printing. It gives you the flexibility to choose between three different Citrix printing solutions:

  1. Citrix Universal Printer: You can use PrinterLogic to provision direct IP printers to the endpoint device, then print to the Citrix Universal Printer. This avoids common problems with Citrix drivers because it allows for driverless printing. You also avoid other Citrix printing problems by capitalizing on PrinterLogic’s simplified administration, which makes installing, changing and removing printers much easier.
  2. Citrix auto-created printers: Here, too, you can use PrinterLogic to provision direct IP printers to the endpoint device but then use the Citrix auto-creation or redirection features instead. As with the Citrix Universal Printer, you can harness print job compression and PrinterLogic’s simplified administration along with driverless Citrix printing.
  3. Session printers: This solution involves provisioning direct IP session printers in PrinterLogic. It allows you to tap into additional print management features, such as proximity (aka location-based) printing and our solution’s renowned self-service printer installation portal, which gives end users the ability to identify and install nearby printers with a single click. Plus you can use PrinterLogic to deploy new Citrix drivers and printers without having to rely on group policy objects (GPOs) and other rights management tools.

Because of this flexibility and seamless integration, PrinterLogic sidesteps many of the common issues that cause Citrix printing problems such as print spooler crashes, printing policies, difficult universal printer drivers, and improper printer deployment. This means you can have all the benefits of a leading virtualization solution with none of the Citrix printing drawbacks. And that’s not all. With PrinterLogic, your organization can even eliminate its print servers entirely, further reducing your IT infrastructure and all the related costs of purchase, operation and maintenance.

It’s not just the server admins who will be relieved that they’re no longer dealing with Citrix printing problems. Your end users might not know about the complexity of managing Citrix drivers or deploying printers dynamically without PrinterLogic, but they’ll certainly see how printing is transformed once PrinterLogic’s Citrix printing solution is implemented.