Many organizations have implemented Citrix Virtual Apps to reduce their physical infrastructure while increasing the manageability and flexibility of their computing environment. At the same time, the inherent complexity of virtualization and app streaming has led to persistent challenges when it comes to enterprise printing. This has prompted some of those organizations to compile and adopt Citrix Virtual Apps printing best practices that have helped to smooth a few of the wrinkles in their print environments.

Through our work with customers intent on addressing their unique Citrix Virtual Apps printing challenges, we at PrinterLogic have compiled our own brief but hopefully handy list of some of those best practices.

1. Minimize the number of print drivers. Drivers account for something like 90% of issues and instabilities in any print environment, so keeping them to a minimum should help to limit the number of error-causing variables while improving manageability. Thinning them out might be a time-consuming process, but it will be worth it in the end. You’ll want to update outdated drivers to a consistent version, delete drivers for printers that are no longer in use, or switch to manufacturers’ universal drivers where possible.

This is a best practice that extends far beyond Citrix printing to enterprise printing in general, making it a first and fundamental step in any list. It also informs some of the other Citrix Virtual Apps printing best practices below.

2. Enable the Citrix Universal Print Server. By using the Citrix Universal Print Server, you address the printer driver issue I just mentioned. It avoids you having to install device-specific drivers and replaces them with a single native driver solution that also optimizes network utilization for print data traffic. That means, in addition to improved manageability and stability, you could also see speedier printing and less bandwidth usage throughout your organization.

One drawback to the Citrix Universal Print Server is that not all printers are fully compatible with its default formats. It might require purchasing new hardware or finding workarounds. Another thing to bear in mind is that the Citrix Universal Print Server has some strict software requirements and needs extensive policy configuration to work smoothly. I suggest consulting Citrix’s excellent Virtual Apps support documentation for the recommended settings.

3. Use session printers. This might be a matter of opinion rather than a hard and fast rule, but many experienced Citrix admins will advise using session printers instead of printer redirection (also called auto-creation in Citrix printing parlance).

Why? Because of the extra steps and extra load involved in printer redirection. When a client with three printers logs on, each of those printers is automatically mapped on the server—even if the user only intends to use one of them. And if you’re using native drivers, they will be automatically loaded too. This runs contrary to the “minimal drivers” approach and, given the many Citrix Virtual Apps printing issues that drivers can cause, it creates the potential for spooler crashes, printer errors and server hangs.

Unless your organization has an unavoidable need for printer redirection, session printers are likely your best bet.

4. If print drivers are a must, use native drivers and isolate them. When using device-specific drivers in preference to the Citrix Universal Print Server, it’s important to make sure that the drivers are designed for your particular server infrastructure and your particular machines. This might seem painfully obvious, but it’s very common to find a lingering driver still in use, even though its printer model or server version was retired long ago.

Starting with Windows Server 2008 R2, admins gained the ability to isolate certain print drivers. Should any problems arise, isolation will keep their effects confined to an individual user instead of causing the print spooler to crash and affecting all users.

5. Take advantage of tools that test your Citrix Virtual Apps printing environment. Citrix offers a couple of software tools that can put certain aspects of your print environment to the test for robustness and compatibility. One of them is StressPrinters, which, like the name suggests, will subject your drivers to several rounds of stress tests to see how they handle loads and interact with various Citrix printing components. This tool can determine how long it takes for a printer to be auto-created, for example, or if the driver causes the print spooler to stop responding.

A second tool is Print Detective. As a complement to StressPrinters, this can help you troubleshoot poorly coded or incompatible drivers by determining whether they are non-native or non-Citrix. You can also use Print Detective to delete drivers that are unwanted, unused or not designed for Citrix printing.

Conclusion
While this list of Citrix Virtual Apps printing best practices is by no means comprehensive, it should provide a solid basis for troubleshooting your own print environment and resolving some of the more universal challenges of Citrix printing.

Still stumped? Need expert advice on a particular printing problem in your Citrix Virtual Apps environment? At PrinterLogic, we’ve got plenty of experience in making Citrix printing more reliable and manageable, thanks to our next-generation print management solution. Simply get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to help.

In tech circles there’s a lot of excitement about the cloud these days. And rightly so. Cloud computing makes it possible to divest your organization of costly physical infrastructure while providing more flexibility to your workforce. At the same time, cloud-based initiatives such as enterprise cloud printing have a key requirement that might be a deal-breaker for some organizations.

What requirement is that exactly? Dependence on the WAN.

With most enterprise cloud print software, print jobs must be routed via a remote server. That means the local print job travels across the WAN to the cloud printing hub, which then relays it back across the WAN to the local printer. Even though the two endpoint devices might not be more than ten or twenty feet away from one another, the print job is forced to make multiple network hops and travel offsite.

This reliance on the WAN has three significant drawbacks:

1. It introduces a single point of failure. If the WAN connection is interrupted in any way, cloud printing is halted across the organization. An organization will either need to invest in expensive always-on failover strategies or it will have to brace itself for the inevitable flood of support calls and loss of productivity when the WAN fails.
2. It exacerbates WAN bottlenecks. On account of its finite bandwidth, the WAN connection already acts like a constraint on network traffic. When data-hungry print jobs are regularly traveling across the WAN, the available bandwidth for other applications shrinks. This can mean slower browsing and choppier communications if you’re using some form of VoIP solution.
3. It can result in slower printing. Even if the WAN is functioning normally and network traffic is relatively light, the fact that your enterprise cloud print software routes every print job along this long, WAN-dependent path increases the likelihood that your end users will have a slower cloud printing experience.

Because this dependence on the WAN is unavoidable for the vast majority of enterprise cloud printing solutions, these shortcomings tend to come with the territory.

But not with PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud).

PrinterLogic SaaS is a next-generation enterprise cloud printing solution that leverages the same underlying direct IP paradigm as its on-premises counterpart, PrinterLogic Web Stack (formerly Printer Installer). Direct IP printing enables PrinterLogic SaaS to establish point-to-point connections between clients and printers, so a WAN connection is no longer necessary when cloud printing. End users click “Print” from their clients and the print job travels across the local network to the printer—the shortest, fastest, most reliable route.

In addition to eliminating the single point of failure associated with the WAN, PrinterLogic SaaS eliminates those other long-standing single points of failure: print servers. By implementing PrinterLogic SaaS, you can realize all the anticipated benefits of cloud printing by reducing your traditional print infrastructure to almost nil. No more server migrations, server upgrades and server maintenance. Ever.

And not only will you enjoy the freedom of a simplified print environment, you’ll also enjoy the freedom of simplified print management. PrinterLogic SaaS allows you to deploy printers reliably and accurately to users without using cumbersome GPOs and scripts to do so.

With PrinterLogic SaaS, you can also provide your users with advanced functionality like Mobile Printing and Pull Printing. These sought-after features are usually only available from additional third-party vendors with other enterprise cloud printing solutions, but our cloud printing and print management solution offers them as native features.

If you’ve been taking a “wait and see” approach to cloud printing until now, your wait is over. PrinterLogic SaaS is revolutionary enterprise cloud print software that lets you declare your independence from the WAN while providing more features, more scalability and more ease of use than even on-premises print management solutions can claim.

Posted by Devin Anderson

As we all know, there’s often a gap—sometimes a large one—between perception and reality. And how do you close that gap? Through impartial data, real-world information and analysis. In enterprise printing, that’s what print job tracking is for.

Yet an organization’s ability to track print jobs is only as good as its print job tracking software. In many environments, that software is bundled with their primary print management solution—which is to say, it’s somewhat lacking. That’s because the tracking and auditing functionality in these solutions is usually pretty basic. At best, it’s barebones, capturing broad print-related data like the job name or the user who initiated the job. At worst, it’s an afterthought and barely usable.

How can you improve print job tracking in your organization and extract meaningful, actionable data from users’ print activity? Here are some general tips followed by a single solution that puts all of them into practice.

1. Get a fix on your print environment. It’s hard to derive order from chaos. Before you can hope to gather quality print job tracking data, you need to have a solid overview of your organization’s entire print environment. Non-centralized print management solutions make this challenging because they tend to foster a fragmented environment with poor overall visibility, especially in geographically distributed organizations.
2. Convert printing data into relevant figures. The real-world significance of print activity sometimes gets lost in translation. Telling a decision-maker that your company’s top 50 users are each printing upwards of 1,000 color pages per month might not carry a lot of weight. But putting it in more immediate terms—that, for example, those users’ combined printing habits cost the company roughly $120,000 per year—will certainly get their attention.
3. Don’t regard all print jobs as equal. Context is an integral part of any print job tracking initiative. For instance, it makes sense if the sales team is generating a lot of print activity on a daily basis, but if one user in R&D is printing out a large number of documents late at night, something could be seriously amiss. To establish that context, you’d need to be able to organize print job data by criteria like department and time. It helps if your print job tracking software is up to the task.
4. Remember the role of infrastructure. Consumables aren’t the only way to measure the impact of print activity. Printing takes its toll on your print infrastructure, too, so it’s helpful for you to know how your hardware is holding up. You can do this in the short term by setting up SNMP monitoring (provided your print management software supports it), which will keep you informed of individual printer status. Over the long term, you need to parse through the available data to determine where your printers are seeing the most usage.

Those four print job tracking tips might sound simple enough, but they’re difficult to implement with ordinary print management solutions. Sifting through the limited print job data you have in search of wider trends can be tedious at the best of times, and identifying anomalies like over-utilized printers or users who frequently initiate large jobs can be downright impossible. Being able to tie that data to actual, up-to-the-minute costs is no cakewalk, either.

PrinterLogic’s next-generation print management solution has powerful core-level print job tracking functionality, which captures print job data for network as well as USB-connected printers right at the source. That gives you access to essential print-related information about who is printing what and where.

But that’s only the start. PrinterLogic’s print auditing and reporting feature allows you to organize that data according to criteria like user, printer, department or time. You can view jobs at the level of the individual user or an entire department. You can have print usage related in terms of current costs. And you can instantly share that information with managers and decision-makers via automatic emailed reports.

Along with PrinterLogic’s centralized admin console and SNMP monitoring, implementing comprehensive print job tracking has never been easier, more cost-effective or more rewarding.

Virtual desktop interface (VDI) solutions like VMware have the ability to offer your organization a consistent, lean computing experience across a variety of distributed locations, but VMware Horizon printing doesn’t always succeed in meeting every organization’s needs or expectations. The reasons for that generally fall into two broad categories: flexibility and reliability.

Out of the box, VMware printing has two basic options for provisioning printers:

• Printer redirection: End users can print to a predetermined locally attached or network printer via the View virtual machine. No printer driver needs to be installed on the master image. However, there are several potential drawbacks. One is that the print job travels across the WAN twice, which consumes bandwidth and increases WAN dependency. The second is that the document for printing is converted from its original file type to a special print-only file type, creating the possibility of rendering problems. The third is that VMware Horizon printer redirection only works with a select number of operating systems.
• Location-based printing: This offers some of the flexibility that printer redirection lacks. Instead of end users being limited to certain printers, nearby printers are delivered to them as they move. This is especially useful in highly mobile environments such as hospitals and universities. When a Horizon client initiates a print job, the View VM simply receives and renders the job before passing it to the printer. The tradeoff here is that the processes for dynamically assigning printers and their related drivers aren’t always dependable.

To nip some of the most common VMware Horizon printing issues in the bud, there are a few recommended courses of action:

• Double-check your printer drivers. Before users can print successfully using VMware Horizon printer redirection, the correct drivers have to be installed on the client. Some of these drivers might not play well with virtual VMware printing, so be sure to vet them for compatibility and update them accordingly.
• Review your group policy objects (GPOs). If you’re using location-based printing in VMware, the printer assignments will hinge on your group policy setup. GPOs are a nightmare to configure and maintain, especially in large organizations, and group policy conflicts can routinely result in failed deployments. Though it will be painstaking and anything but fun, you really need to ensure your GPOs are dialed in.
• Use a third-party VMware printing solution. When an IT professional who’s new to VDI asks his or her peers how to solve the challenges of VMware printing, most admins don’t hesitate before advising them to seek out a third-party solution. The problem is that most of these solutions require additional infrastructure and oversight.

Solve VMware Horizon printing issues with PrinterLogic
PrinterLogic’s next-generation print management solution integrates seamlessly with your VMware printing environment to provide the necessary stability, ease of management and reliability to overcome many of the VMware Horizon printing issues noted above.

Its acclaimed centralized management console allows you to add, update and remove printers as well as drivers across your entire VMware environment with just a few clicks. Its effortless deployments enable you to deliver printers to end users with all the dynamic, automated benefits of location-based printing—but without the need for GPOs and scripts. Its direct IP printing paradigm establishes one-to-one connections between clients and network printers, which curtails print-related WAN traffic. Its intuitive self-service portal empowers end users to identify and install nearby printers themselves with a single click.

And, just as importantly, PrinterLogic does all this without the need for any new infrastructure. In fact, you can use our on-premises solution as well as our new SaaS cloud-based solution, PrinterCloud, to completely eliminate print servers from your VMware Horizon printing environment. Permanently removing all that expense and hassle from your print environment could very well be the best practice there is.

If only virtual print problems weren’t real print problems. But it doesn’t get much more real than when you have end users trying to print and they’re encountering error after error. That’s when the helpdesk calls come fast and furious, and your support team has to stop whatever they’re doing to deal with urgent server crashes, rogue drivers and other virtual printing problems.

And to make matters worse, there are many forms that those virtual printing problems can take:

• Printers that should be installed don’t appear in the virtual machine.
• An end user clicks “Print” in the VM but there is no corresponding response.
• The print job appears to print but doesn’t enter the queue.
• The job appears to enter the queue but isn’t executed by the printer.
• The job executes but pages, images and/or blocks of text are missing.

As in most other scenarios, virtual print drivers are usually the culprit in these instances. However, buggy or incompatible drivers can actually exacerbate matters and create troubleshooting roadblocks on account of printer redirection, which is the method that’s frequently used to provision printers into a virtual session. Printer redirection requires the client machine and the virtual server to be in perfect sync, and something as simple as a version mismatch or a slight difference in naming (such as a space) can cause printing to fail.

There are also more general issues with virtual printing that could apply to many print environments. These include poor driver and printer management, a lack of easy-to-use printer installation for end users, and over-reliance on the WAN connection in centralized setups.

For reasons of cost and simplicity, many organizations first try to make do with the basic native print capabilities of their virtual solution. When their virtual printing problems escalate to a point where they’re having a noticeable impact on productivity, it’s common for those organizations to look for dedicated virtual printing software as a way to stabilize and streamline their print environment.

Unfortunately, those virtual printing software solutions can make things even more difficult.

If the software doesn’t integrate fully and seamlessly with the virtual environment, it creates another moving part, another risk of incompatibility, another potential point of failure. If it only deals with the virtual printing process and not the management of virtual print drivers and printers, then it fails to address some of the root causes of virtual printing problems. And if it relies on traditional provisioning methods, then it can’t promise a next-generation solution to longstanding drawbacks.

That’s why PrinterLogic is different.

Our print management solution works uniquely and seamlessly alongside VDI environments like VMware and Citrix to simplify and enhance their native virtual printing capabilities. It brings unprecedented ease to print management through its intuitive centralized management console, which allows you to add, administer and remove printers as well as virtual print drivers anywhere in the organization from a single pane of glass. You can deploy printers to users without wrestling with GPOs and scripts and even set up speedy automated deployments based on Active Directory criteria like organizational unit (OU), group and IP address.

PrinterLogic uses proven direct IP printing to establish direct connections between clients and local printers, eliminating further longstanding virtual printing problems like unreliability and WAN dependency. And our popular self-service portal allows end users to identify and install nearby printers entirely on their own with a single click. That saves them and your support team a helpdesk call.

Unlike mere virtual printing software, the power and scalability of our solution enables your organization to eliminate its print servers too, so you can bid farewell to your high-maintenance print infrastructure at the same time as you’re waving goodbye to your virtual printing problems. What’s more, PrinterLogic now has a SaaS virtual printing solution called PrinterCloud, giving you a choice between a cloud-based or an on-premises implementation.

Since the launch of the iPhone ten years ago, Apple’s mobile devices—along with their bespoke operating system, iOS—have become ubiquitous. They’re in our homes, our cars, our schools. On planes, buses, billboards and TV. They’ve even made substantial inroads into the enterprise, where Apple products had previously been regarded as niche devices. As a result, many admins have been caught flat-footed in supporting them, not least when it comes to enterprise iOS printing.

This isn’t necessarily because admins are reluctant to support iOS devices or iOS printing. It’s because traditional IT frameworks and print infrastructure just haven’t been up to the task. These infrastructures were designed decades ago with a static environment in mind—workstations on desks, basically. And while that environment hasn’t gone away entirely, the widespread adoption of mobile devices like the iPad and iPhone over the past decade shows how much has changed.

Today, enterprise iOS printing isn’t just a luxury. It’s an inevitability.

iOS Printing Problems
But that inevitability still doesn’t change the fact that enterprise-scale companies aren’t as prepared to support mobile printing as they ought to be. As many organizations have already discovered, basic iOS printing problems can arise regardless of whether you choose to have BYOD or company-issued devices or a mix of both.

End users don’t always understand the steps that are involved in supporting these devices in the enterprise (“But I can print just fine at home!”) either, which can lead to dissatisfaction and top-down as well as bottom-up pressure on admins to deliver some sort—any sort—of iOS printing capability.

AirPrint in the enterprise
Some IT professionals understandably make AirPrint their first port of call before implementing iOS printing. However, AirPrint is more of a consumer-oriented technology, and its entry into the enterprise hasn’t been totally easy or seamless. One big drawback is that printers have to be AirPrint-enabled to ensure native compatibility, which means shelling out for new premium hardware when your existing printers might be perfectly functional.

The alternative is shopping around for iOS printing solutions that bolt onto existing print servers. This approach fills your IT life with additional complications, such as having to use scripting and GPOs to manage printer driver deployment, creating a single point of failure, and cost and expense just to support iOS printing.

iOS printing solutions
The most cost-effective and future-proof iOS printing solutions for the enterprise are those that cater to all mobile devices, not just certain brands, and work seamlessly with all printers, even legacy models. And that’s exactly what PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing does.

Our next-gen software requires zero client-side installation to deliver simple, full-featured mobile printing. There’s no app, no special device settings. No matter what OS they’re using, all authorized mobile users have to do is tap the “Share” button, then “Print,” and finally select their desired PrinterLogic printer. That’s it.

For BYOD and guest devices, it’s just as easy. They can leverage the proven email-to-print functionality of PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing solution to simply send their files to a printer’s dedicated email address. There’s no need for them to be on-network to have reliable printer access.

Best of all, PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing meets the most fundamental requirement of enterprise iOS printing: security. Admins have the ability to control precisely who can print what and to which printers, right down to the detailed output options like color and paper tray.

Mobile Printing is available from our on-premises print management solution as well as our popular new software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud-based solution, PrinterCloud. You can choose whichever PrinterLogic solution best suits your organization knowing full well that your end users can now enjoy seamless, full-featured iOS printing support.

Like any virtual environment, Citrix environments can be incredibly complex. When that complexity is compounded by the inherent complexity of enterprise printing, it can lead to Citrix Virtual Apps printing problems that are frustrating for end users, difficult for admins to troubleshoot, and hard for an organization to ignore.

So how can you retake control of Citrix printing and master your Virtual Apps experience? Let’s start with a brief look at some common Citrix Virtual Apps printing issues, followed by some best practices, and finally a proven solution to the ongoing challenges of Citrix printing and print management.

Common Citrix Virtual Apps Printing Issues
In theory, Citrix printing to a local printer should be pretty straightforward. In practice, however, it’s rarely as easy as it sounds. That’s because printing in virtual environments hinges on a chain of contingencies, and if one of these links should fail, your end users will be unable to print.

One of the weakest links in that chain is printer drivers, which account for roughly 9 out of 10 print-related issues. In addition to causing a variety of Citrix Virtual Apps printing issues like failed print jobs on an individual user basis, a rogue printer driver can crash or hang the print spooler, resulting in an inability to print for all users supported by that server.

Citrix Virtual Apps Printing Best Practices
There are a few things you can do to make your Citrix printing environment a little more robust toward printer driver problems and related instabilities.

• Keep your drivers updated: Generally, driver updates have fixes for Citrix Virtual Apps printing issues and other bugs that have been reported to the manufacturer. But do note that this can go both ways, as updates can actually introduce incompatibilities from time to time.
• Isolate your print drivers: If you’re using Windows Server 2008 R2 or higher, you can isolate certain print drivers. This won’t necessarily prevent all driver crashes, but it will keep erratic drivers and any resulting problems confined to an individual user when Citrix printing to a local printer.
• Match the print server OS and the Virtual Apps OS: To help prevent additional driver incompatibilities, the OS used on your print server should be the same as your Virtual Apps OS.

A Solution to Citrix Printing Challenges
PrinterLogic’s direct IP backbone and superior print management avoids many Citrix Virtual Apps printing issues by making it easier to implement best practices and even eliminate the common causes of print-related issues.

Using PrinterLogic, you can provision printers into Citrix sessions in one of three ways: with the Citrix Universal Printer, with Citrix auto-created printers, or as session printers. These allow you to leverage driverless printing, for example, and make effortless deployments without the need for scripts and GPOs. PrinterLogic enables accurate and reliable proximity printing, too, so you can get printers in the hands of specific end users based on Active Directory criteria—automatically and dynamically.

You can update drivers or roll them back with a few easy clicks, and changes to drivers or printer settings are automatically applied without any end-user intervention. Furthermore, administrative tasks like adding, changing or removing printers can be carried out from our centralized management console, which gives you powerful yet intuitive control over the full scope of your Citrix printing environment from a single pane of glass. With our next-generation print management solution, you can even eliminate print servers entirely, saving your organization costs and headache.

Despite the complexity of Citrix printing, implementing PrinterLogic is a powerful, cost-effective way to circumvent common Citrix Virtual Apps printing issues while simplifying print management, increasing print availability and shrinking your print infrastructure.