Print servers can be complex beasts. Just ask anyone who’s spent time as an admin in a medium- or large-sized organization. Designed to make group printing easier, print servers have nevertheless managed to earn a (well-deserved) reputation for being difficult and resource-demanding. And that applies even to recent releases like Windows Print Server 2012 R2.

Things can be equally challenging when it comes to formulating best practices for print servers. There are hundreds of different possible implementations for a print-server-based infrastructure as well as different print server releases—anything from legacy server software up to and including Windows Print Server 2012 R2. This introduces a huge number of variables into the mix and makes one-size-fits-all solutions difficult. But not impossible, as we’ll see.

To begin with, let’s narrow our focus to Windows Print Server 2012 R2 and fairly common server implementations. Then we can consider three important best practices:

1. Limit the number of clients. Any print server can get overwhelmed when too many clients are connecting, and that’s no different for Windows Print Server 2012 R2. This makes perfect sense no matter what the situation: A bus that has to make 100 stops is going to run more slowly than one that only has to make ten along the same route. For that reason, you’ll want to account for the system resources (e.g., CPU, RAM) and restrict the number of clients to something manageable. Microsoft doesn’t mention any specific guidance on this in its own documentation for Windows Print Server 2012, but it does ask admins to keep in mind that print activity picks up substantially during the course of the working day.
2. Use client-side rendering where possible. Often it’s best to have the individual clients to do the heavy lifting than putting the combined load on your print server. Windows Print Server 2012 R2 gives you the option of having clients render print jobs into page description language (PDL) format before sending them to the spooler instead of the other way round, which can reduce the amount of processing the server is expected to do. This can not only speed up print times but prevent the spooler in Windows Print Server 2012 R2 from crashing as frequently.
3. Aim for fewer drivers as well as driver uniformity. Windows Print Server 2012 R2 uses the v4 driver model. This is supposed to be more efficient and more stable than earlier driver iterations. If you have to use v3 drivers or a large variety of drivers for different printer models, you run the risk of increased incompatibilities and more server-side rendering, which in turn increases the likelihood of crashes and printing errors. Therefore it’s best to migrate to as many v4 drivers as your environment will allow (keeping in mind that this can be problematic when using OS versions earlier than Windows 8) and keep the total number of drivers low regardless of the version.

Of course, because of those real-world variables, not all environments that rely on Windows Print Server 2012 R2 will be able to put these best practices into effect. For a true one-size-fits-all print management solution, there’s PrinterLogic. Our next-generation print management software is powerful and versatile enough to eliminate print servers completely—along with their attendant costs, limitations and headache—while delivering greater functionality, cost-effectiveness and centralized management.

With PrinterLogic, you don’t have to worry about limiting the number of connected clients because our solution is infinitely scalable with no hit to performance. It’s also far more robust toward driver incompatibilities and is capable of handling large driver repositories with ease or giving you powerful, flexible universal driver options to help streamline your printing environment further. So when you’re looking for best practices when dealing with Windows Print Server 2012 R2, there’s really only one to keep in mind: Implement PrinterLogic for smart, stable enterprise printing and be done with your print servers forever.

Posted by Jordan Pusey

In distributed enterprise environments that rely on a central print server, you’ll find that there are two fundamental disadvantages. The first has to do with the single point of failure that a centralized infrastructure creates: If the server goes down for any reason, printing stops for the entire organization. Even with expensive, high-maintenance redundancy measures in place, that single point of failure poses a threat to basic productivity. The second disadvantage has to do with increased load on the WAN connection and leaves almost all organizations asking how they can minimize or reduce their WAN print traffic.

When remote locations are connected to a central server via a WAN link, everything rests on that lone connection. And that means it becomes a conduit for more than email or Internet traffic—it’s got to handle print-related data as well. The trouble is that print-related data isn’t known for its efficiency. Print jobs that measure only a few hundred kilobytes in size when they leave the client machine can balloon to tens or even hundreds of megabytes once they’re rendered at the central server. In WAN printing scenarios, those much larger jobs then have to travel back to the local printer.

Now calculate the size of all those individual jobs on an enterprise scale. Suddenly you’re talking about gigabytes of printing data moving back and forth across the WAN. All of that places extra and, as it happens, unnecessary load on the vital WAN connection. It’s no wonder that many organizations are looking for ways to minimize print-related WAN traffic, which would not only safeguard and speed up printing but also any other WAN-reliant online activity.

Traditionally, the default solution to minimize print-related WAN traffic has been to install additional print servers at remote locations. Although this might address some of the more glaring WAN printing issues, it’s an expensive and non-optimal solution because it costs money to procure, maintain, operate and ultimately upgrade print servers. Consolidated print environments usually have centralized management paradigms in place, too, and print servers are not always easy to manage remotely—particularly when they crash.

PrinterLogic’s next-generation print management solution rethinks WAN printing completely. It delivers all the benefits of a consolidated print infrastructure while allowing your organization to minimize print-related WAN traffic from the get-go. Furthermore, it eliminates the single points of failure associated with print servers, because PrinterLogic allows your users to continue printing as usual during a WAN failure or even in the rare event of a server outage. Here are just a few of its advantages:

• Centralized management: No matter how widely distributed your organization, PrinterLogic enables you to oversee and administer every printer across the enterprise from a single pane of glass. And it does so without the usual drawbacks of print servers and WAN printing.
• Minimal infrastructure: Unlike conventional print management solutions, PrinterLogic doesn’t require you to install a unique server in every single location where you want to implement reliable printing. Because PrinterLogic leverages proven direct IP technology to create direct connections between client devices and printers, local printing remains robust and traffic from WAN printing is reduced considerably.
• Scalability and flexibility: PrinterLogic’s print management solution doesn’t just minimize print-related WAN traffic. It effortlessly grows and adapts to your organization’s size and structure. What’s more, through modules like Pull Printing and Mobile Printing, you can easily introduce enhanced functionality across your entire print environment.

If you’re looking to minimize print-related WAN traffic and fix the inherent vulnerabilities of WAN printing, PrinterLogic can put those goals—plus many more—within reach from the moment of deployment.

Posted by Andrew Miller

The healthcare industry has a unique set of needs when it comes to print management—a statement that ought to come as no surprise to doctors, nurses, clinicians, front desk staff and hospital administrators. They know how much their day-to-day operations rely on being able to print documents quickly, conveniently and securely. Yet most healthcare printing solutions are infamous for being anything but quick, convenient or secure. As a matter of fact, many of these solutions are better known for causing healthcare printing problems with a negative impact on customer service.

Below is a brief overview of the key considerations you should keep in mind when scoping out potential healthcare printing solutions. These will help you avoid choosing the wrong print management solution and encountering the standard healthcare printing problems that could impede your ability to deliver first-rate care.

Seamless integration with electronic medical record (EMR) and electronic health record (EHR) solutions. Despite EMR/EHR being a fundamental component of modern medical practice, this is the Achilles heel of most healthcare printing solutions. Often these solutions take a patchwork approach, forcing organizations to deal with conflicting systems and workflows. And serious healthcare printing problems can arise when latent incompatibilities between print management software and EMR/EHR solutions cause server or client crashes that disrupt printing and even result in data loss.

24-7 print availability. Print downtime can ruin a patient visit and turn an otherwise routine day for a physician into a nightmare. Medical professionals and their staff need to know that they can rely on their print environment to be there when they need it—to the extent that downtime isn’t even a concern. They also need to know that their workstations and mobile devices will automatically be able to print to their desired printers. That requires dynamic and intelligent printer deployments across multiple platforms, which is not always a feature of healthcare printing solutions.

Security. Patient records, prescriptions, treatment regimens, schedules…all these should be treated with the utmost confidentiality. Any print management solution that claims usability in the healthcare sector needs to offer secure printing options that honor the trust patients have in their providers. Just as importantly, the security of these healthcare printing solutions has to be easy to implement across the entire medical and administrative staff, else it could create unnecessary issues or simply go unused for the sake of convenience.

As a result of these considerations, more and more organizations like Princeton Community Hospital, OhioHealth and Laser Spine Institute are turning to PrinterLogic to solve their healthcare printing problems and regain control of their enterprise print management.

PrinterLogic bests other healthcare printing solutions because it offers features that include centralized management, targeted printer deployments without the use of group policy objects (GPOs) or scripts, as well as seamless integration with EMR/EHR systems, including popular solutions like MEDITECH and Epic. And the proof of its benefits have been borne out in application after application. For example, the independent research firm TechValidate found that half of the healthcare organizations it surveyed reduced their time spent on print management by 70%—or more!—by implementing PrinterLogic (TVID: 0C3-0B7-DBD). They also found that more than 9 out of 10 healthcare organizations that deployed PrinterLogic saw ROI in excess of 100% (TVID: 974-51E-75E).

Those benefits, coupled with PrinterLogic’s proven ability to eliminate print servers while adding functionality, are why organizations facing healthcare printing problems are putting an end to their struggle by choosing our next-gen print management software. Medicine has to stay on the cutting edge, so why shouldn’t your healthcare printing solution?

Print spooler crashing is one of life’s more frustrating events because it’s so difficult to pinpoint the actual cause. Print servers, in general, are susceptible to a whole host of software problems, and any one of these can result in the print spooler not working.

The first obvious sign of your print spooler crashing on Server 2008 R2 is going to be sudden print downtime for the users that depend on that particular print server. To restart the spooler, you’ll either have to reboot the server outright, open a command prompt with administrative privileges and run the command “net stop spooler” then “net start spooler” or using the GUI, access the list of services under Administrative Tools in Server 2008, then choose the “Restart” option from the contextual menu after locating the Print Spooler process. You might chalk the first few instances up to chance, but as print spooler crashing becomes a more common occurrence, you’ll then have to take the time to do some more serious digging.

To assist you in your search, here are some of the more common culprits for print spooler crashing in Server 2008 and their fixes.

Rogue print drivers: Some print drivers can cause memory corruption or are simply incompatible with different devices in your environment. If you suspect that a bad driver is ultimately resulting in the print spooler not working, you can try one of three things:

1. Enable print driver isolation. This is probably the most highly recommended first step when you encounter print spooler crashing because it keeps print drivers from interfering with basic software printing processes. By isolating them, they inflict less damage when they choke.
2. Update your print drivers to the latest version. Manufacturers occasionally release new print drivers with tweaks and bugfixes that address compatibility issues. But keep in mind that updating your drivers can occasionally introduce new problems and incompatibilities.
3. Downgrade the rogue print driver. If you’ve identified a problematic print driver that is definitely up to date, every now and then rolling back to an earlier version can rectify the situation.

Malformed jobs in the queue: Sometimes it isn’t drivers but print jobs that cause print spooler crashing in Server 2008. You’ll first want to examine the print queue and see if there are “stuck” or “ghost” jobs and purge them. If there doesn’t seem to be any wayward jobs, monitor the queue as client devices are printing to see if dropped connections are resulting in malformed jobs. To resolve flaky connections, it might be necessary to delete and reinstall the printers one by one.

Excessive printer sessions: Print servers get overwhelmed more easily than you think, which is why it’s a good idea to know how many active printer sessions your print environment is establishing with that server. Too many simultaneous sessions can flood the print queue and result in the print spooler not working. There are workarounds to accommodate additional sessions, but this can involve editing sensitive registry settings. The typical fix for this is to purchase an additional print server—yet that’s a costly and unnecessary step.

The surefire and permanent way to eliminate print spooler crashing on Server 2008 is by eliminating your print servers altogether. PrinterLogic makes that possible through its proven cost-effective, low-footprint enterprise print management solution that provides all the functionality of print servers—and much, much more—with none of the usual drawbacks.

With PrinterLogic, instead of print spooler crashing and long troubleshooting processes, you get features like centralized management, self-service printer installation, print job reporting, seamless integration with virtual solutions and the option to easily add Mobile Printing and Secure Printing across your entire print environment.

Posted by Jordan Pusey

If you look around at different IT environments, you’ll find that many of them adopt a “gatekeeper” approach in which admins hold the keys and grant end users access to various aspects of the infrastructure as needed. This is especially true in print environments where routine tasks like printer installation generally tend to be handled by admins, and the prevailing print management paradigms reinforce this by making tasks like deployment and installation admin-level functions. Even if admins wanted to allow users to install printer drivers and printers themselves, they would often find themselves limited by their print management solutions.

In organizations where admins are able to allow users to install printer drivers and printers on their own, there’s usually some degree of trepidation. And not without good reason. When users are given free rein to initiate driver or printer installation themselves, things can and often do go wrong, which results in the admin having to spend time cleaning up improper installs, replacing incorrect drivers or purging jobs from some random queue they were never supposed to enter in the first place.

With that in mind, there are two major requirements if you want to allow users to install printer drivers and printers without admin rights or admin intervention:

1. Ease of use. For end users to be able to carry out printer installation without hand-holding, the process needs to be simple and transparent. The convoluted process of mapping printers in print-server-based environments is anything but easy and usually requires familiarity won through trial and error before most users are comfortable doing it themselves. At any rate, it’s not something that you could expect new employees to understand on their first day. An intuitive printer installation process that can be grasped by any employee—from top-level veteran executives all the way to temporary freelancers—is the ideal.

2. Zero risk. The very real chance of things going wrong is perhaps the biggest reason why admins are reluctant to allow users to install printer drivers or printers routinely and without supervision. So in addition to being easy to understand and use, the driver and printer installation process has to be virtually foolproof to avoid creating more problems than it solves.

At PrinterLogic, we’ve long regarded end users as a vital but untapped resource in all kinds of print environments. But we also recognize the need to minimize the excess options and complexity that can lead to those same end users making costly mistakes. That’s why our next-generation print management solution empowers end users with a self-service printer installation portal that enables them to easily identify and install nearby printers with a single click. In equipping users with their desired printers, it also allows those users to install printer drivers—that is, the correct and authorized ones—at the same time.

How does it work? It’s as simple as opening a webpage in your browser. Provided your organization has uploaded the optional floorplan maps, the user can easily see where the nearest printer is and click on it to install. That’s it. In large or distributed organizations, the portal has the ability to open right to the user’s physical location based on IP address. Just short of automated dynamic deployments (which, as it happens, our print management solution can also do), it’s the easiest way to allow users to install printer drivers and nearby printers. And the same basic functionality allows IT support staff to carry out printer installation with non-admin rights.

With the “gatekeeper” approach to print management comes a lot of extra work for admins. Thanks to its forward-thinking method of printer installation, PrinterLogic makes it possible for your organization to allow users to install printer drivers as well as printers by themselves—easily and safely. That alleviates the administrative burden of print management and eliminates one of the most common reasons for service desk calls.

Getting the right printers to the right users has been a challenging task for print management admins ever since the first network printer went online. Even more challenging is ensuring that those users get the right printer driver. Traditionally, printer driver deployment has been accomplished largely through group policy objects (GPOs), yet instances of the GPO not installing the printer driver properly for one reason or another abound. There are multiple root causes for this as well as similar GPO printer problems, making it hard to isolate a single one-size-fits-all fix.

However, if you’re having trouble with the GPO not installing a printer driver, there are two basic troubleshooting paths you can take.

1. Adjust Point and Print Restrictions: This is a significant source of wider GPO printer problems in environments that rely on print servers running certain versions of Windows. In the Group Policy Management Console, you’ll need to look under both the User Configuration and the Computer Configuration trees for the “Printers” options. There you can either disable the Point and Print Restrictions policy altogether (this method is clearly less secure), or you can edit the respective policies to better complement your organization’s unique deployment method and infrastructure.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t always solve issues with the GPOs failing to install printer drivers, and some admins have resorted to delicate registry fixes as workarounds.

2. Re-examine your group policy settings: Group policy is rigidly hierarchical, with objects nested within ever larger objects. One small omission or oversight could result in a user or client device being omitted from the correct pool, thus causing printer driver deployment issues and other GPO printer problems. Double-check to ensure that the target is in the right domain or organizational unit (OU), then double-check to ensure that the printer driver is indeed supposed to be delivered to that grouping with or without the necessary permissions, such as admin rights. This might seem self-evident, but you’d be surprised how often the strictures of group policy end up excluding a target because of a tiny permissions or elevation setting.

But here’s a definitive solution to GPO printer problems that you might not have considered: PrinterLogic. Our enterprise print management solution does away with printer related group policy completely. At the same time, it allows for more reliable, precise and dynamic printer and driver deployments than you ever thought possible using GPOs, and with a great deal more flexibility than traditional print management solutions.

This is because PrinterLogic’s next-generation software integrates easily with common domain services like Active Directory but isn’t subject to the same restrictions as group policy. When you’re seeing a GPO fail to install a printer driver under your current print management solution, PrinterLogic will allow you assign and automatically deploy that same driver according to more finely tuned criteria with just a few simple clicks in its centralized management console.

Furthermore, PrinterLogic doesn’t force you to abide by strict rights requirements. Admin rights are almost always necessary to make any changes to GPO deployments in traditional print environments, but PrinterLogic allows any IT staff of your choice, including support staff, to alter printer and update driver deployment assignments without risk to the security or stability of your network.

If you’re tired of printers and their drivers failing to get to the right users, maybe it’s time to stop struggling with GPO printer problems and implement a print management solution that works for you, not against you. PrinterLogic is fast and easy for organizations of any size to implement, requires minimal infrastructure compared to print servers, and offers cutting-edge features like Mobile Printing and Secure Printing on top of its effortless standard print management functionality.

I’ll bet some of you had to do a double take when reading that headline. Wait, what? Citrix print management without GPOs and scripts? Is such a thing even possible in the complex world of Citrix printing?

It is possible with PrinterLogic. Our enterprise print management solution integrates seamlessly with virtual environments to make printing in Citrix easier than ever. That simplified administration and end-user ease of use naturally extends to printer deployments, which have traditionally been one of the most problematic aspects of Citrix print management on account of all the moving parts that need to be taken into account.

What do I mean by “moving parts”? Well, to get the right printer to the right user on a consistent and reliable basis, the hundreds of organizations across the world that rely on Citrix printing have typically had to develop specialized scripts or use group policy. Owing to their level of customization, scripts can introduce a bit of flexibility into printer deployments, but the big drawback is that they can slow down session logons or even cause more serious logon issues. If they fail to run to during the logon process, for example, the user has to keep rebooting until they do. Furthermore, scripts often have to be rewritten when there are any changes in the environment, such as new printers, which only succeeds in adding more steps to Citrix print management.

Group policy, on the other hand, is rigidly hierarchical and doesn’t tolerate exceptions very well. That means when an end user moves to a new department or logs on at a temporary location, group policy deployments will often restrict that user from identifying and accessing nearby printers. That obviously prevents authorized users from printing in Citrix until they’ve called the service desk and the support team has been able to troubleshoot the problem, likely by tinkering with the GPO assignments.

PrinterLogic’s next-gen solution provides Citrix printing support that avoids the need for GPOs and scripts and also brings newfound flexibility to Citrix print management. With PrinterLogic, deploying printers for printing in Citrix can be accomplished in one of three ways:

• With the Citrix Universal Printer: Use PrinterLogic to deploy direct IP printers to the endpoint device and then print to the Citrix Universal Printer. This Citrix printing method provides simplified administration and the versatility of driverless printing. It even supports home printers for your remote employees.
• With Citrix auto-created printers: This method also deploys direct IP but printers leverages the auto-create/redirect features of Citrix printing. Along with PrinterLogic’s simplified administration, there’s support for driverless printing and print job compression.
• With Session printers: This offers PrinterLogic’s broadest range of Citrix print management options. By deploying direct IP printers into each session, your organization can take advantage of such features as proximity printing (also known as location-based printer deployment), our solution’s acclaimed self-service printer installation for end users, instant printer creation and more streamlined printer deployment. Plus there’s Citrix Universal Printer support too.

Because PrinterLogic brings its own feature set to Citrix print management while integrating into your virtual environment as fully as a native Citrix printing solution, your organization is able to deploy printers to end users according to a wide range of Active Directory criteria and IP address—dynamically and automatically, and without having to resort to GPOs or scripts. The result is that your end users will enjoy instant and uninterrupted printing in Citrix wherever they happen to be.

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions are used by countless organizations all over the world to provide a consistent, easily managed desktop environment to their end users. For most everyday computing tasks within these organizations, VDI solutions are ideal. But there’s one common task that has become infamous for its difficulty: VDI printing. That’s because virtual solutions, for all their obvious benefits, aren’t always suited to the logistics involved in efficient print management—reliable printer deployment and installation chief among them.

The unfortunate result is VDI printing issues that are well known to the IT community. Some of those VDI printing headaches include:

• Challenges maintaining driver repositories and minimizing driver conflicts
• Lack of confident and fine-grained control over printer deployments
• WAN bottlenecks and generation of network VDI printing traffic
• Poor integration of VDI printing solutions into the existing virtual environment

It might come as a relief to know that you don’t have to struggle with problems like these any longer. PrinterLogic’s enterprise print management solution integrates seamlessly with virtual environments like Citrix and VMware to eliminate these and other VDI printing issues with its next-generation approach. Unlike many VDI printing solutions, PrinterLogic introduces a powerful feature set that works alongside the native printing functionality of the virtual environment. By enhancing built-in VDI printing functionality rather than replacing it outright, our solution is able to deliver a smoother, more stable and more intuitive experience for admins and end users alike.

A perfect example of this is printer installation. Typically, virtual environments take a top-down approach to VDI printing, which makes it difficult for end users to install new printers without admin intervention. And that process often requires the end user to call the service desk—an investment of time and resources that can take its toll on productivity. PrinterLogic moves beyond standard VDI printing solutions by providing a convenient self-service portal. This empowers end users to install nearby printers themselves quickly and easily while avoiding VDI printing issues like misidentified printers or incomplete installations.

Another source of VDI printing issues comes from deployments. When printers are provisioned to users on the basis of group policy objects (GPOs) or custom scripts, as is common for most VDI printing solutions, these methods can prove inflexible and unreliable. The hierarchy of GPOs can be too restrictive for dynamic environments, and the demands of scripts can prolong logon times. PrinterLogic allows you to provision printers on the basis of a number of criteria, including Hostname, IP or MAC address and Active Directory (AD) user, computer, group, container or organizational unit (OU). Those variables give you a lot more precision and allow for greater automation as well as effortless location-based printing.

PrinterLogic enables your organization to eliminate VDI printing issues and related headaches by bringing intelligent, robust, feature-rich print management to your VDI printing along with seamless integration and centralized administration.