For a long time now, the never-ending struggle of managing and maintaining printer drivers has been a major source of grief among admins, regardless of the size or nature of their print environment. Sometimes it seems the only reason they call them “drivers” is because they never fail to drive you up a wall. If your entire printer fleet is made up a single printer model from a single manufacturer or you’re already using a driverless printing solution, maybe driver management isn’t such a nightmare for you. But the majority of print environments are a hodgepodge of printing devices—some new, some legacy—that pose a challenge to driver management.

Even a distributed organization that uses only one brand of printer runs into challenges with driver management. If they employ localized print servers, admins typically maintain drivers for every model on each print server. That’s a laborious process. If there are 32- and 64-bit drivers to support different operating systems, admins often have to create two separate servers to avoid the wrong version from being installed—effectively doubling their workload. If the incorrect driver is installed on a client because of confusing naming conventions or a glitch in the deployment process, it can lead to spooler crashes and printing errors. That’s how driver-management problems can cascade into persistent and widespread printing problems.

Is getting rid of drivers the right answer?
Frustration with these common issues leads some IT decision-makers to consider driverless printing solutions. One common go-to is CUPS, a well-known and free choice for driverless printing. CUPS was first released in 1999, and has a long and respectable open-source history for bridging the gap between a variety of operating systems and printing devices. The major problem with CUPS is it belongs to the realm of driver-specific solutions and not print-management solutions. It may solve some driver issues, but often requires extensive configuration and doesn’t make administrative tasks like printer deployment much easier.

Another option is to buy printing devices that have built-in support for driverless printing. This can be expensive, and the drawback is that manufacturers have different ways of implementing driver-free protocols, so you could be looking at one type of driverless printing for your Canon devices and another type for your HP devices. Not to mention it does nothing to help with legacy printers.

Finally, you can look at third-party software that touts driverless printing. But like CUPS, very few of these solutions are actually print-management solutions. As such, they’re not likely to make printer deployment and administration easier—and could end up adding complexity to your print environment.

Effortless print management, not driverless printing
Instead of a driverless printing solution, what you really need is a print-management solution that enables you to maintain and manage drivers effortlessly. A print-management solution with a single centralized driver repository for your entire organization, enabling you to increase standardization and avoid compounding your administrative effort. A solution that allows you to assign a specific driver to a particular printer model across your print environment simply by ticking a checkbox. One that makes it as easy to update printer drivers as it is to roll them back if you’re experiencing unexpected incompatibilities. One that allows you to maintain 32- and 64-bit drivers side by side, for example, without worrying about the wrong version getting installed.

That’s exactly what PrinterLogic delivers. Our enterprise print-management solution makes driver management a breeze and prevents those all too common driver issues from ballooning into larger printing problems. PrinterLogic’s centralized admin console gives you a window onto your entire print environment, including all of your printer drivers, and its intuitive but powerful interface makes adjusting profile settings and deployment configurations as simple as using a dropdown menu. It turns the nightmare of driver management into one of those beautiful dreams that you never want to see end.

Eliminating the driver-management pain point—even in intricate virtual environments like VMware and Citrix—is how PrinterLogic provides an attractive alternative to driverless printing in the first place. Its unparalleled driver management capability, its remarkable printing stability (thanks to direct-IP printing), and its remarkable ease of use for admins and end users alike, helps you eliminate driver woes (not to mention your print servers) once and for all.

Security is a hot topic in the technology field and print management security shouldn’t be left out of the conversation. Confidential documents being printed each day, IT staff is at work to make sure the right people access the right printers, and even integrating with existing security technologies such as badge readers at the printer are all needing to be managed better. As infrastructure is moving to the cloud we can start looking at PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud), to start addressing these security issues.

We’ll cover three topics that PrinterLogic SaaS will help with:

1. Give print access to the right people
2. Hold print jobs until users are in front of the printer
3. Use badge swipe to release held print jobs

PrinterLogic SaaS gives IT administrators and help-desk staff the ability to manage network printers without the need of a print server. Included in the management capabilities is the ability to auto-deploy printers as well as publish printers for self-installation without needing to setup complicated GPOs or scripts. For example, you can target Active Directory Users, Computers, Groups, Containers, and OUs to automatically install printers. This guarantees that users will automatically have printers installed that IT staff knows they should have installed.

PrinterLogic SaaS also has a self-service installation web page that users can access to install printers on their own. They find a printer on a floor plan map or in a list, click on it, and select “Yes” to install. On the backend, IT staff can make sure that the printers are published to the correct users by using PrinterLogic SaaS’s portal security filters. The filters include:

• Active Directory User
• Active Directory Computer
• Active Directory Group
• Active Directory Container
• Active Directory OU
• IP Address Range
• Hostname
• MAC Address

An example would be with an executive’s printer. You can isolate that printer in the PrinterLogic SaaS management interface to only show up on that executive’s self-installation webpage and no one else’s.

Now that we have the correct printers to the right printer, let’s address holding sensitive print jobs until users are in front of their printer. PrinterLogic SaaS calls this Secure Printing. With PrinterLogic SaaS’s Secure Printing, users can securely send a print job to the printer, choose to hold it, and then walk up to the printer to release the print job. They can authenticate using their Active Directory credentials on a web based release portal using their phone, tablet, laptop, or a kiosk device that has internet connectivity. This will present a menu where the users can select a job to release and it will print to the printer are in front of.

PrinterLogic SaaS can take advantage of security badges today by using a printer application that is designed to be installed on certain models of Ricoh, Lexmark, and Dell (Lexmark) MFPs. What this allows a user to do is send a print job from their computer, walk up to the printer, select the PrinterLogic SaaS icon on the MFPs touch screen, and swipe a badge to release the print job. It is required that the Ricoh MFPs be on platform 10, 11, and 12 and also have the Java module added to them. The Lexmark machines need to be on framework 3.x, 4.x, or 5.x. PrinterLogic SaaS will continue to add more make and model support.

With the ability to now easily distribute printers to the correct people, IT staff doesn’t have to worry about anyone erroneously printing to HR printers, executive printers, or to specialty printers such as plotters and receipt printers. HR and Finance departments can safely print their documents without racing over to the office MFP before someone sees their sensitive documents. We find that users become more accountable for what they are printing and paper waste is actually eliminated when using the secure print feature.

To see all these features and more, all you have to do is go to www.printerlogic.com/printercloud and click “Start Trial.” That will give you all the access you need to start securely managing your network printing environment.