For a long time—too long, in fact—enterprise printing has pretty much been dominated by two architectures. The first is direct IP printing. The second is print servers.

Direct IP printing is great because it’s reliable and straightforward. But in its conventional form, direct IP printing suffers from a lack of manageability because each client–printer connection has to be established and updated manually. This makes direct IP printing inefficient in all but the smallest and most static environments. It also doesn’t offer a centralized window into the print environment, which hinders overall visibility.

Whether consolidated or distributed, Windows print servers offer improved manageability, especially in large or distributed organizations, but they do so at the expense of reliability. Print spooler crashes—which can be caused by corrupted print jobs, driver incompatibilities, and a host of other issues that stem from single points of failure—have the potential to bring printing to a halt for large pools of users or even the entire organization until the problem can be identified and fixed.

Furthermore, print servers can be expensive to purchase, operate, maintain and upgrade, and routine printer deployments and installations can be finicky as they depend on complex hierarchical attributes like group policy objects (GPOs) or a certain level of technical skill from end users. This is why many admins have long looked for a Windows Print Server alternative that will free them from the constraints of print servers while leveraging their advantages.

Wouldn’t it be great to have something like direct print server software — a solution that would combine the stability of direct IP printing with a Windows Print Server alternative that offered centralized manageability, increased oversight, reliable deployments and additional enterprise printing features?

That next-generation solution is precisely what PrinterLogic offers. Our enterprise print management solution is the centrally managed direct IP print software you’re looking for. It’s a Windows Print Server alternative that actually enables your organization to eliminate print servers entirely while enjoying the proven reliability of direct IP printing along with the ability to administer printers anywhere in the print environment from a single pane of glass. In short, it’s effortless and robust printing without a print server.

The advantages of PrinterLogic’s print management solution are extensive. To begin with, you can automatically and dynamically deploy printers using criteria like Active Directory (AD) attributes, IP address ranges and even MAC addresses in a direct IP printing environment without having to rely on GPOs or scripts. All of those deployments can be set up and modified using our acclaimed web-based admin console, which offers intuitive yet powerful control over the entire print environment.

Unique among Windows Print Server alternatives is PrinterLogic’s self-service installation portal, which empowers end users with the ability to identify and install nearby printers with a single click. You can even upload floorplan maps to make it easier for them to select the right local printer. By replacing your print servers or traditional direct IP printing environment with what amounts to hybrid of the two models that has this kind of functionality, you can drastically reduce print-related calls to the service desk as a result. That saves time, resources and ultimately money.

And that’s not all our solution can do. You can easily enable advanced features like Mobile Printing and BYOD Printing as well as print auditing to imbue your print environment with additional capabilities that can increase productivity, offer more flexibility and provide additional insight into your print environment. PrinterLogic’s solution delivers a level of manageability that is simply unavailable with conventional direct IP printing and a level of stability and functionality that no other Windows Print Server alternative can provide.

Posted by Jordan Pusey

There are a lot of organizations out there running some pretty complex print environments. But if we had to say which sector tended to operate the most intricate print environments alongside incredibly stringent requirements, it would undoubtedly be healthcare. Not only are there a lot of high-pressure situations and moving logistical parts, hospitals, medical facilities and other healthcare organizations also have to ensure strict confidentiality of patient records. That makes the stakes higher in healthcare printer management than in many other industries.

Which is why it’s a shame that healthcare printer management solutions are so lacking. What you often find are Epic or MEDITECH environments—largely because these solutions can ensure HIPAA compliance in print management—in which the actual printer and driver management is sometimes a seat-of-your-pants, crossed-fingers exercise. Once a print environment is set up, it’s almost dangerous to disturb it because the balance is so delicate. Adding new drivers can cause system-wide instability. Adding new printers can inexplicably result in the loss of print functionality for certain users.

In hospital printer management scenarios where Epic is the solution of choice, the process can also be tedious because Epic requires manual intervention on each Epic Print Server (EPS) when changes are made. In dynamic environments like hospitals and medical facilities, this process is incredibly time-consuming and can in fact result in unforeseen problems because it increases the likelihood of human error. The tradeoff for HIPAA compliance in print management, it would seem, is more uncertain and laborious print management.

Organizations like OhioHealth and Princeton Community Hospital thought so too—until they discovered PrinterLogic. Our next-generation enterprise print management solution is ideal for healthcare printer management, including challenging hospital printer management implementations, because it has advanced secure printing features that can help ensure HIPAA compliance in your print management operations while also providing an ease of use that is simply unprecedented in the healthcare sector.

For example, in Epic environments, PrinterLogic completely transforms the print management paradigm for the better. Instead of having to make meticulous individual changes across each EPS, PrinterLogic allows admins to make a single change in its centralized web-based management console, which it then pushes out to every corresponding EPS. It doesn’t matter whether you’re changing a tiny setting on one printer profile or making a batch edit to the whole printer fleet—PrinterLogic saves huge amounts of time and effort, drastically reducing the investment in healthcare printer management across the entire organization.

The same could be said for MEDITECH environments. Like Epic, which has its share of well-known quirks, MEDITECH can’t be assumed to work with just any hospital printer management solution out of the box. Except for PrinterLogic, that is. PrinterLogic’s convenient centralized driver repository and its ability to avoid print-driver conflicts prevents the common driver-related issues from affecting MEDITECH printing. When an IT environment includes diverse hardware and software, PrinterLogic can be the decisive factor in ensuring high print availability and maximum uptime in the print environment. And that’s something that physicians as well as their patients will appreciate. Their lives might even depend on it.

Generally speaking, hospital printer management has a lot of room for improvement, but you can’t entrust your print environment to a healthcare printer management solution that won’t stand up to high-demand, mission-critical applications and the strict security requirements of HIPAA compliance. PrinterLogic has been field-tested in rigorous healthcare implementations that include Epic printing, MEDITECH printing and even more conventional medical print environments (such as Guthrie, the Orthopedic Institute of New Jersey and Laser Spine Institute) where it’s either partially or completely eliminated the need for print servers. As complex and exacting as hospital printer management can be, it can do the same for you.

Posted by Devin Anderson

Tired of dealing with Windows Server 2012 print management and all the headache the goes along with enterprise print servers? You’re far from being the only one. Widespread dissatisfaction with traditional print management solutions like print servers has led an increasing number of organizations to discover PrinterLogic’s next-generation enterprise print management solution, which delivers unprecedented ease of use with powerful administrative capabilities and a vastly reduced infrastructure footprint.

Before we look at PrinterLogic in more detail, let’s first consider all the work that goes into print management with Windows Server 2012. To begin with, there’s the enterprise print servers themselves. These need to be purchased, housed, maintained, rebooted, upgraded and ultimately replaced. All of that requires time, expense and effort above and beyond day-to-day Server 2012 print management and all the administrative oversight that entails.

Part of that day-to-day print management of Server 2012 includes tasks like printer deployment. This often requires finicky group policy objects (GPOs) or custom-made scripts in order to get the right printers to the right users, and even those methods aren’t always reliable. Nor do they provide both the precision and the flexibility you need in a dynamic print environment. Printer and driver management leaves a lot to be desired too.

On the end-user side of things, there’s printer installation. Sometimes end users will have the ability to install printers themselves, but to do so they often have to choose blindly from a pool of printers with long and confusing names, and then they have to correctly map that printer (not an easy process for newbies) and hope that the correct drivers are available and install correctly. Print management in Server 2012 hasn’t made the process much easier compared to earlier versions of Windows Server.

Most of the time, the printer installation process is so convoluted, intentionally restricted or prone to errors that end users have to call the service desk and ask for help. That eats up the support staff’s valuable time and prevents them from concentrating on more pressing issues. Like restarting the print server, for example, after the spooler has crashed due to a driver conflict.

And this isn’t a deliberately grim illustration of Server 2012 print management. For many organizations that continue to rely on enterprise print servers, this is the daily reality they face. As one of our customers once mildly put it: “Print server management is no cakewalk.”

PrinterLogic’s unique, forward-thinking approach to enterprise print management changes all that. With PrinterLogic, you have the ability to eliminate your enterprise print servers completely and replace all of them with a single instance of our infinitely scalable print management software—even in large, geographically distributed organizations. All that cost and hassle of purchasing, maintaining and replacing print servers? It disappears.

And, unlike print management in Server 2012, PrinterLogic’s intuitive management console gives you access to and control over your entire print environment from a single pane of glass. Making changes to one or more printers is as simple as a few clicks, and it’s possible to deploy printers individually or en masse, manually or automatically, without ever having to bother with GPOs.

Plus PrinterLogic can be easily enhanced with additional functionality to suit your organization’s print environment. Are you considering Mobile and BYOD printing? Secure printing? Advanced print auditing? Seamless integration into your existing (or future) Citrix or VMware environment? In stark contrast to Server 2012’s print management, PrinterLogic can deliver all those features without resorting to third-party solutions.

With PrinterLogic, you can rid yourself of the headache of enterprise print servers and transform your print management into a streamlined, cost-effective, feature-rich platform that works for you, not against you.

Posted by Jordan Pusey

Software as a service (SaaS) has taken the enterprise and SMB spaces by storm, and it’s not hard to see why. SaaS solutions, such as collaborative document editing or SaaS printing, provide organizations with the ability to enjoy enterprise-level features and support at a reasonable subscription-based cost.

As the prevailing wisdom goes, however, SaaS solutions are still in their infancy and don’t always handle special requirements smoothly. Therefore they’re best suited to organizations that have traditional, run-of-the-mill IT infrastructures. So, for example, customers with a Citrix or VMware virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment wouldn’t draw much benefit from a SaaS print management solution because it would require too many workarounds to make it sufficiently time-saving or cost effective.

At PrinterLogic, we’re accustomed to challenging the prevailing wisdom. Our popular on-premises print management solution proved that organizations of any size could completely eliminate their print servers—something they once thought impossible—in exchange for a far more feature-rich and easy-to-manage enterprise printing solution that brought newfound stability and flexibility to their print environment. With incredible ROI to boot. Thanks to its seamless integration with VDI solutions, PrinterLogic’s next-generation print management software even enabled organizations with virtual environments to enjoy the same power, availability and ease of use in VDI printing. Well, now the same can be said of SaaS printing.

PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud) is PrinterLogic’s cloud print management solution, and it integrates just as seamlessly with VDI environments such as Citrix and VMware as our on-premises solution. And yet, as you might expect from PrinterLogic, PrinterLogic SaaS delivers all the benefits your organization would want to derive from the forward-thinking SaaS printing model.

In a Citrix environment, PrinterLogic SaaS imports all the information typically stored on a print server, including name, location, IP address, drivers and profiles, during the simple migration process. From that point onward, fat clients can print directly to network printers and zero clients can print to the network printers via the central Citrix server. Better still? With PrinterLogic SaaS printing, the need for print servers is gone. You can simply eliminate them from your print infrastructure. Oh, and best of all? You’ll enjoy effortless cloud-based SaaS print management that is simply unattainable with typical VDI printing solutions.

To name just a few of the advantages of SaaS print management with PrinterLogic SaaS, depending on how your organization chooses to implement our SaaS printing solution:

• Deliver printers to end users automatically according to Active Directory (AD) criteria, subnet, hostname, etc.
• Empower end users with a self-service portal to identify and install nearby printers themselves
• Easily manage printers and drivers via an intuitive cloud-based administrative portal
• Accurately deploy printers and drivers without using group policy objects (GPOs) or scripts

And because PrinterLogic SaaS is such a versatile yet consistent SaaS print management solution, the implementation and advantages are almost identical for VMware setups.

PrinterLogic SaaS refutes the idea that SaaS printing is still beyond the reach of virtual environments. By taking PrinterLogic’s advanced approach to enterprise print management and transferring it to the cloud, PrinterLogic SaaS provides organizations that use Citrix or VMware with even more flexibility in terms of cost and implementation. Take a look at this brief video to see how straightforward and effective PrinterLogic SaaS can be when it comes to SaaS print management in VDI environments, and then start your free trial to see how seamlessly it can be implemented in your organization.

Posted by Devin Anderson

There’s a fundamental drawback to centralized virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments that can be summed up in three letters: W-A-N. And, as we’ll see, this can have a serious impact on your VDI printing in VMware or Citrix.

As you probably already know, WAN stands for wide area network—the link to the networked world beyond your immediate four walls. VDI solutions place a heavy reliance on the WAN because they swap a purely local environment for one that is hosted centrally or offsite. In distributed environments, this means that the data transfer that traditionally took place within the client terminal itself is instead relayed over the WAN connection. Although this architecture has many advantages, VDI printing is not one of them.

That’s because VDI printing in VMware, Citrix and other virtual solutions puts additional strain on the WAN. Printing is an inherently data-intensive operation, and that goes double for VDI printing, as print jobs can easily consume your finite WAN throughput and balloon in size as they are bounced from client to server, server to server, all the while subjected to different rendering or compatibility measures before finally being relayed to the local network printer. Some organizations have implemented VDI printing solutions to improve the functionality of out-of-the-box VDI printing, yet these can actually lead to even more WAN load because they increase the number of rendering or relay steps.

Unlike these inferior VDI printing solutions, PrinterLogic’s next-generation enterprise print management solution was designed to have both a small physical footprint and a small network footprint. It uses direct IP technology to create one-to-one connections between client devices and network printers, so print job data travels along the most efficient and direct route—thereby reducing the WAN traffic in VDI printing scenarios. What’s more, PrinterLogic is so compact and powerful that you can replace your entire print server infrastructure with one on-premise server running a single instance of our infinitely scalable software.

For VDI printing with VMware, PrinterLogic seamlessly integrates with the virtual solution to enhance its print capabilities and manageability. After implementing PrinterLogic in your VMware environment, you’ll be able to dynamically and automatically deliver printers to end users on the basis of criteria like Active Directory (AD) user, group, organizational unit (OU), IP address, as well as hardware identifiers. That means you can enjoy features promised by advanced VDI printing solutions—including location-based printing—without the usual caveats like greater reliance on the WAN.

The same can be said for VDI printing with Citrix. Depending on how you choose to implement PrinterLogic, you can configure VDI printing using the Citrix Universal printer (for increased printer compatibility), using Citrix auto-created printers (preferred in many environments) or using session printers (to unlock additional PrinterLogic-exclusive features). Whichever way works best for your organization, PrinterLogic is able to leverage direct IP printing to reduce WAN usage to a minimum during VDI printing. That frees up bandwidth for other WAN-reliant applications and eliminates a key point of failure in the print environment.

Through PrinterLogic, it’s possible to regain complete control over VDI printing while addressing one of its most glaring vulnerabilities—regardless of whether you’re VDI printing using VMware, Citrix or a niche virtual solution. PrinterLogic stands out among VDI printing solutions on account of its seamless integration, cost effectiveness, high availability and unparalleled ease of management, not to mention its ability to eliminate print servers completely. With it, you’ll be able to keep VDI printing from burdening the WAN while taking print management to a whole new level.