Windows Print Server Alternatives from PrinterLogic

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For a long time, print servers have been considered the de facto standard for enterprise print management. It’s not necessarily because they’re the best solution, but they are capable of meeting general enterprise printing needs—as long as you’re willing to put up with drawbacks such as instability and poor driver management.

A few of those drawbacks can be softened by following Windows print server 2012 best practices and other expert recommendations. However, if you’re tired of compromises and downtime, it might be a good idea to start thinking of alternative enterprise print management solutions that enable total print server replacement and elimination.

First, let’s back up a little and address those drawbacks in more detail. These include routine problems like spooler crashes, limited printer deployment methods via group policy objects (GPOs), and inefficient printer installations. Some are worse than others because they result in system-wide printing downtime, but even the minor issues can take their toll on productivity.

Like many enterprise IT professionals who are responsible for print server management, you’ve probably just learned to deal with them over the years. You might have implemented Windows print server 2012 best practices like driver isolation to minimize crashing, or you might have developed custom scripts for more tailored deployments. But you might not have seriously considered whether or not there was a better way—simply because Windows print server is so commonplace.

It’s time for you to get to know PrinterLogic. Our print management solution is the Windows print server replacement you’ve been hoping to find. By leveraging the strengths of direct IP printing and incorporating only the best aspects of print server management, PrinterLogic is able to provide a flexible, stable, small-footprint, cost-effective and incredibly easy-to-use platform for your enterprise printing. With PrinterLogic, you don’t need to strictly adhere to Windows print server 2012 best practices to get the following universal benefits:

  • Centralized management: From a single pane of glass, you can deploy and administer any printer anywhere in the organization. Furthermore, the interface is so simple and intuitive that you can easily make batch changes to profiles or set default printers by ticking a checkbox.
  • Instantaneous and targeted deployment. Automatically deliver the right printers to the right users based on any number of criteria, including Active Directory integration. And all without resorting to scripts or complex GPO hierarchies.
  • Next-gen modular features: Want to provide intuitive mobile printing capabilities to your entire enterprise—even on legacy printing devices? How about adding secure printing functionality like pull printing? PrinterLogic’s print server replacement gives you the ability to implement advanced printing options across the organization in a clean, user-friendly way.
  • End user empowerment: Our acclaimed self-service portal allows end users to identify and install nearby printers with a single click. The days of calling the service desk for printer installation walkthroughs are over.
  • Seamless Citrix and VMware integration: Print server management is notoriously tricky when dealing with virtual solutions. PrinterLogic can either enhance or replace the native printing functionality in virtual environments, making printer deployment, installation and administration easier than ever.

The best part about it is that one server running a single instance of PrinterLogic’s print management software can replace a whole fleet of print servers. That’s not just an alternative to Windows print server—it’s a solution that supersedes print servers entirely.

Eliminate Your Slow Print Servers

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Posted by Devin Anderson

These days speed is a basic consideration in everyday life. We take the drive-thru at Starbucks because it saves us five minutes. We upgrade your smartphones because the latest model launches apps a couple of milliseconds faster. Even when we go on vacation, we try to book the most direct flight to our destinations: There’s no time to waste before we start relaxing!

This need for speed has undoubtedly carried over into the enterprise, and it can be a decisive factor in the efficiency of your workflow and the productivity of your employees. Yet it’s another day and you’re stuck dealing with slow Windows 2012 R2 print servers. Or your Windows server 2008 R2 printing is slow. Or your brand-new, cutting-edge print server has slow spooling. And given how vital printing functionality is across all areas of your organization, constraints like these naturally have an impact on your bottom line.

So why aren’t enterprise printing solutions subject to the same speed requirements as everything else? Is it simply because we’ve come to expect slow 2012 R2 print servers? Have we just gotten used to our server 2008 R2 printing being slow?

PrinterLogic understands the importance of efficiency and speed. That’s why we developed an enterprise print management solution that allows you to eliminate print servers completely. In doing so, you remove the bottlenecks and instabilities that lead to print server’s slow spooling, crashes and downtime—not to mention the ongoing costs of procurement, operation and maintenance that make print servers far more expensive than we often assume.

Our next-generation enterprise print management solution keeps your printing moving at a brisk pace because it avoids the common disadvantages of print servers. For example, in a distributed environment, print servers are often placed at each geographic location throughout the organization. This might prevent slow 2012 R2 print servers because it limits the server’s load. But it also restricts centralized insight into the local print environment and requires on-site support when deploying printers. Or when the print server inevitably crashes.

In a centralized print setup, the problems are different. If for instance, you’re seeing your server 2008 R2 printing slow down at the main location, you can be sure that printing is slow for the entire organization. This often has to do with WAN bottlenecks that restrict the amount of data traffic traveling between the primary server and the remote sites. PrinterLogic’s solution neatly sidesteps both of these problematic scenarios by creating direct IP connections between clients and printers from a single central server. This minimizes WAN traffic between sites but offers the incredibly small footprint of a centralized print environment. Even in the rare event of a server outage, with PrinterLogic your end users can keep printing as usual with no loss of core functionality.

Along with these benefits, PrinterLogic provides unparalleled centralized management and oversight from a single pane of glass. Unlike the mysterious causes of print server slow spooling, which can result from driver issues, improperly deployed printers, or any number of other problems that require extensive trial-and-error troubleshooting, PrinterLogic’s print management solution gives you an eye onto your entire print environment. Not only is it robust to the 32-/64-bit driver incompatibilities that cause slow print servers in 2012 R2, it’s incredibly easy to make individual or batch changes to printers using PrinterLogic’s simple management software console.

The essential fact is this: You don’t have to struggle with print servers’ slow spooling or your aging server 2008 R2 printing slowly any longer. The speed that you’ve come to expect in all aspects of your life is available in an enterprise print management solutionthat brings many more advantages besides—including cost-effectiveness, security, seamless integration with virtual environments, and ease of use. Above all, you can eliminate your print servers and all their attendant costs and headaches.

5 Ways to Decrease Print Consumables Cost

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Posted by Andrew Miller

Most organizations know that print consumables account for a significant and ongoing part of their enterprise printing budget. Research has shown that, on average, it can cost anywhere from $0.05 to $0.08 per sheet for black-and-white laser prints or $0.12 to $0.15 per sheet for color laser prints—with inkjet prints typically priced considerably higher. What’s often overlooked is that the costs of those print consumables leave a lot of room for improvement. Fortunately, there are some easy ways to reduce printing costs and lessen their impact on your bottom line.

Here are five ways to reduce print consumables costs that any organization can implement:

1. Duplexing. Enabling double-sided printing for your devices by default can come close to halving your paper consumption. With the right print management solution (see #5), setting automatic duplexing for all printers can be as simple as marking a checkbox in the management console. That makes this method one of the simplest and fastest ways to reduce printing costs right away.

2. Rotate printers. As printing devices age, they can become less efficient and reliable. Maybe you have an old workhorse printer in your own office that occasionally prints streaked, unusable pages or goes through toner at a faster rate than its more current counterparts. Regularly rotating printers out of high-use settings and into low-use settings can reduce print consumables costs and even get more life out of your fleet. One caveat, though, is that you need insight into your print environment to know how to rotate printers effectively.

3. Limit color usage. Let’s face it, even the most environmentally conscious and budget-oriented employees still like to print their documents in color when grayscale will suffice. Color is obviously more visually appealing, but it’s also at least twice as expensive. By restricting the availability of color printing—once again, you’ll need the right print management software to make this an easy task—you can reduce printing costs dramatically.

4. Make printing more intentional. By harnessing new paradigms like pull printing, your organization can cut down on wasted print jobs and all the consumables they fritter away. Pull printing divides print jobs into two steps: initiation (clicking “Print”) and execution (authorizing the printer to carry out the actual printing, commonly through a badge reader or LCD panel input). This prevents print jobs from being forgotten or abandoned in the output tray. And it doesn’t just reduce print consumables costs. An important side benefit is that it also makes printing more secure.

5. Implement PrinterLogic. This is actually the single most effective step toward reducing printing costs because it makes the preceding methods even easier to achieve. PrinterLogic’s acclaimed centralized management console allows you to set resource-saving default options for any printer in the organization from a single pane of glass. Its Pull Printing module and Print Auditing capability integrate seamlessly into any environment, providing benefits like effortless oversight, user-friendly security and data-driven insight into your entire print environment. Together these can help reduce print consumables costs by changing wasteful printing habits.

Furthermore, PrinterLogic’s next-generation enterprise print management solution can do far more than reduce the costs of consumables. Because it has the ability to eliminate print servers completely while delivering increased functionality and stability, our solution can reduce printing costs associated with infrastructure, including procurement and maintenance. That’s why close to 70% of organizations surveyed by the independent research company TechValidate reported a 15% reduction in consumables usage through PrinterLogic (TVID: 7F5-FCC-413), and 88% in a separate survey reported 100% ROI or greater after installing PrinterLogic (TVID: 054-57D-184).

Struggling with Citrix Print Driver Management? We Can Help

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Citrix printing is one of those reluctant necessities in the enterprise. Your organization would be completely stuck and unproductive without it, which is of course, not something you or your end users really look forward to.Part of that comes down to the poor state of Citrix print management. Multiple printing methods, limited control and the inability to deploy printers with rock-solid reliability make it difficult for IT to ensure that every user is automatically and consistently able to print to their desired printer.

Another ongoing problem with Citrix print management concerns Citrix print drivers — specifically, ensuring compatibility and managing them in a way that doesn’t create the kind of instability and conflict that causes downtime. This can be a particular problem with legacy printing devices that might not have updated drivers. It’s also problematic in Citrix printing environments that have a broad mix of printing devices.

PrinterLogic specializes in making print management as effortless as possible, even in virtual environments like Citrix. So if you find that you’re struggling with managing Citrix print drivers—and, believe me, you’re not alone—you can rely on PrinterLogic’s next-generation Citrix print management software to integrate seamlessly with your virtual solution and provide you with an unprecedented level of control over your Citrix printing and driver management.

Unlike some other solutions that claim to support Citrix printing, PrinterLogic doesn’t restrict you to a specific printing method or force you to adopt a new paradigm. With PrinterLogic you can deploy printers intro Citrix sessions in any of the following ways:

  • Citrix Universal Printer: By using our solution to provision direct IP printers to the endpoint device and then having that device print to the Citrix Universal Printer, you gain support for home printers and benefit from PrinterLogic’s simplified administration as well as flexible driverless printing.
  • Citrix auto-created printers: Like the above method, using PrinterLogic in conjunction with the auto-create/redirect option in Citrix printing provides support for print job compression and much easier administration of printers and drivers.
  • Session printers: Here you can leverage the power of PrinterLogic to provision direct IP printers into each session, delivering benefits like proximity printing for location-based printer deployment, instant printer creation, self-service printer installation for end users, and no need for rights management.

Whichever method you choose, PrinterLogic brings unparalleled control and simplicity to your Citrix print management. If you choose to use the Citrix Universal Printer alongside PrinterLogic, you can sidestep potential conflicts with Citrix print drivers for legacy or unsupported devices while enjoying an ease of administration that no other print management solution can deliver. Alternatively, if you opt to use discrete printer drivers, PrinterLogic’s robustness and intuitive centralized management console will allow your IT team to conveniently access and maintain a working repository of Citrix print drivers.

The next time you’re shaking your fist at the complications that are an inevitable part of Citrix print management, remember: They’re not inevitable! PrinterLogic can help you better manage Citrix print drivers and regain total control over Citrix printing with our cost-effective print management solution for virtual environments.

Problems with Centralized Print Servers

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When organizations are looking to reduce their infrastructure and simplify their print environments, one of the most common pieces of advice they’re bound to get is consolidate—which, in IT terms, means making one device do the work previously handled by multiple devices. In traditional print environments that continue to rely on print servers, the resulting process of consolidation usually involves eliminating print servers in remote locations and centralizing their print servers at a primary location instead.

In principle, this is an incredibly effective way of shrinking print infrastructure. Now a company with, say, remote offices in Miami, New York and London can make use of one or more centralized print servers at its main location in Los Angeles. By eliminating its remote print servers, the company has saved itself ongoing costs of procurement, operation and maintenance at those branches, and its on-site IT team is able to carry out print server management for the entire enterprise at a single location. A much smaller support staff can remain at the various branches to service the printers themselves.

Unfortunately, there are real problems with centralized print servers, problems that tend to get overlooked in the excitement over cost-cutting and simplification of print server management. Let’s take a look at two of the most glaring issues below:

  • Single points of failure. When print servers are distributed throughout an organization’s remote sites, crashing print servers and the loss of printing are more localized. In a scenario with centralized print servers, the entire organization’s ability to print depends on the hardware at one location. Take our hypothetical company above: Printing in Miami, New York and London stops because Los Angeles has technical difficulties—and with print servers, crashes are a matter of when, not if. It sounds absurd, but therein lies the huge drawback of centralized print servers.Of course, some of that risk can be offset by redundancy. But best practices call for two failsafe backup print servers in mission-critical environments. And those servers have to be purchased, operated and maintained alongside the primary print servers. Those redundancy costs can offset a considerable amount of the savings derived from consolidation.
  • WAN vulnerabilities. Remote locations are connected to centralized print servers by the thinnest of threads: the WAN link. If the WAN connection fails for whatever reason at the remote location, printing comes to a standstill. And if the same thing happens at the central location, printing at all the remote locations is affected.Furthermore, printing isn’t the only data-intensive activity that requires WAN access. Even tiny organizations transfer vast amounts of information over their WAN connection, which can only handle finite amounts of data. During periods of high activity, print job data will be slowed as it travels to the centralized print servers and back to the local printer (usually several megabytes larger after rendering). It can even become corrupted on this inefficient round-trip journey.

But take heart. Consolidation without compromise is possible. PrinterLogic’s next-generation enterprise print management solution delivers all the benefits of centralized print server management and reduced infrastructure—without the print servers!

That’s because PrinterLogic leverages proven direct IP printing to create local connections between client devices and printers. So even in the unlikely event of a central server outage, end users can keep printing as usual with no loss of core functionality. That removes the risk of a single point of failure that is common with centralized print servers. Better still, PrinterLogic keeps print job traffic between local devices, minimizing WAN traffic. And thanks to PrinterLogic’s acclaimed centralized management console, admins can deploy, edit and remove printers anywhere in the organization from a single pane of glass.

If you’re looking to consolidate, look no further. PrinterLogic will minimize your print infrastructure footprint while enhancing the stability and functionality of your print environment.

Eliminate End User Printing Errors

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Posted by Jordan Pusey

What’s the weakest link in your enterprise print environment? An all-too-common response is that it’s end users—largely on account of all the end user printing errors that result in frustrated calls to the service desk. If end users are having so much trouble, surely they’re the issue, right?

At PrinterLogic, we view this situation a bit differently. If your end users are encountering problems, maybe it’s time to take a long, hard look at your print management solution instead. A superior print management solution will minimize end user printing errors by being inherently intuitive, reliable and robust. A smart print management solution will empower your end users as well as your service desk staff to be knowledgeable and confident enough to perform routine print management tasks themselves. More often than not, however, print management solutions such as print servers cover their own shortcomings by treating end users like an obstacle.

One of the most renowned benefits of PrinterLogic’s next-generation enterprise print management solution is its self-service portal. This eliminates end user printing errors by enabling them to identify and install nearby printers on their own. Rather than calling the service desk, they can access a common web page, use a floorplan map to pick out the desired printer, and properly install it on their machines with a single click.

By leveraging end users as an asset in this way, PrinterLogic also reduces the number of service desk calls that stem from end user printing errors, saving time and money in support costs. That’s why, as part of a survey by the independent research firm TechValidate, 89% of our customers reported having simplified end-user printer installation (TVID: 976-528-F0F) and at least one customer saw print-related service desk calls plummet by a staggering 90% (TVID: 138-6AB-436) after installing PrinterLogic.

But printer installation isn’t the only cause of end user printing errors and print-related service desk calls. Downtime plays a big part—whether it’s system-wide downtime from a crashed print server or user-specific downtime due to faulty deployments or driver issues. PrinterLogic prevents downtime because it completely eliminates the need for print servers and print-server-based infrastructure: Even in the rare event of a server outage, end users can keep printing as usual with no loss of core functionality. And by allowing precisely targeted, automatic printer deployments that don’t rely on group policy objects (GPOs) or scripts, users won’t have to face those uncertain, unproductive periods while they wait to receive the right printer.

Crucially, PrinterLogic also features unrivaled centralized administration. From a single easy-to-navigate management console, admins can add, deploy, modify or remove printers—plus their profiles and drivers—anywhere in the organization with instantaneous results. By putting this level of oversight at the fingertips of authorized IT staff, PrinterLogic ensures that they are able to address the needs of end users and proactively eliminate the source of end user printing errors.

And through its Mobile Printing and Pull Printing modules, PrinterLogic’s print management solution can provide advanced functionality and security to your entire print environment without the complexity of configuration and use that often result in end user printing errors. It’s proof that you don’t have to compromise on features just to make your print environment more stable and user-friendly.

With that in mind, let’s return to the opening question: What’s the weakest link in your enterprise print environment? Chances are that it’s your current print management solution. By migrating to PrinterLogic, you can eliminate end user printing errors while also gaining functionality, minimizing infrastructure and reducing the costs of procurement, operation and support.