Posted by Keith Stark

Anyone working in IT will tell you there are two foolproof ways to make your end users angry. The first is if the internet connection is down. The second is if they can’t get a document to print. Either is guaranteed to kick off a stream of support calls.

Standardizing your IT environment helps prevent these situations for end users. For MSPs, IT standardization isn’t only possible in complex and varied environments—it’s also hugely beneficial.

Here at Strata IT, we create as much uniformity as we can for our customers when it comes to hardware and software—everything from the networking stack to our preferred virtualization solution. That’s the key to putting our company philosophy of Total IT into practice. By managing remotely, and solving problems quickly, it minimizes downtime and makes us more efficient and cost-effective as an MSP.

Taking the headache out of RDS printing
That said, printing can feel like a whole different ball game. As hard as we worked to standardize the IT environment for one particular healthcare customer, we weren’t able to completely reign in their print-management problems. There was always something—like employees changing offices, or requesting different printer settings.

The biggest challenge was when users roamed to different locations in their distributed environment. Our Azure-hosted remote desktop service (RDS) solution just wasn’t delivering the right printers—where and when they needed them.

To put it in perspective, this customer had only 40 printers, but we were getting up to 100 print-related tickets per month because of failed deployments and incorrect default settings.

Then a fellow IT expert mentioned PrinterLogic to us. He was from a large enterprise company with thousands of employees. PrinterLogic had succeeded in eliminating their print servers as well as solving their deployment and driver problems.

If it worked for them, we thought, maybe we should give it a try.

We implemented PrinterLogic for our healthcare customer, and we found that it did exactly what it promised. Unlike so many other software solutions, when PrinterLogic says something is “seamless,” like Active Directory integration, it really was seamless.

After setting up subnet-based deployments, we saw a 50 percent drop in print-related support tickets almost overnight.

Ultimately, we ended up using PrinterLogic’s terminal service deployment capability to configure dynamic, automatic printer deployments based on client IP-address ranges. All those roaming users that used to struggle with printing headaches were suddenly getting all the right printers—even if they retained the same terminal-server session as they moved from location to location during the day.

Six months after implementing PrinterLogic, we were seeing about five print-related tickets per month, and most of those were about printer hardware issues like a bad fuser. It was phenomenal.

A scalable, versatile print-management solution
We asked ourselves: “If PrinterLogic performed so well, in an environment that had been so problematic, why couldn’t it do the same in other challenging situations?” For experienced IT veterans, the answer was a no-brainer. And, as an MSP, it seemed crazy not to roll out PrinterLogic to a wider set of clients.

After all, PrinterLogic provided a vastly improved printing experience for our customers—and it led to dramatic reductions in time and energy managing printers on our end. What’s more, it helped us build out the consistency we strive for.

Now we’re using a single print-management solution for all of our customers on a given service tier.

PrinterLogic is so good at what it does, so packed with useful print-management features like print auditing and SNMP monitoring, that having it as part of our standard platform is a unique selling point for us as an MSP: “Outsource your IT needs to Strata Information Technology, and your chronic printing problems will vanish—with a little help from PrinterLogic, of course.”

In the case of an industrial manufacturing firm that was struggling with print-related problems, PrinterLogic helped us seal the deal. Printing isn’t even a concern for them anymore.

That’s something we occasionally remind our clients—both current and prospective—to not take a solution like this for granted. When software is doing its job, there’s a tendency to forget what life was like before. But most of them remember what living without PrinterLogic looked like; no one wants to turn back the clock and revisit the days of failed print jobs, printer downtime and constant help-desk calls.

PrinterLogic has changed how we approach print management as an MSP, and it’s turned printing into a non-issue for our customers.

If your organization isn’t already taking steps to optimize print management, it should be. Printing expenses account for as much as three percent of a company’s annual revenue, and streamlining print operations has the potential to recoup a sizable portion of that cost.

That’s why identifying and implementing a good print-management solution can save you a hefty chunk of change in both the short and long term.

A good place to start is by taking an honest, thorough audit of your existing print-management infrastructure and practices. Then assess those against whatever print-management solutions you currently use. Some suggested focus areas include:

• Knowing your print environment: Which network and USB printers are the most heavily utilized? How does consumables usage vary from department to department? What is your print-server downtime each month? Answers to questions like these will help you get a better fix on your print environment and determine where opportunities are ripe for efficiency gains.
• Optimizing your printer fleet: Do you swap heavily utilized printing devices with less utilized ones to extend their lifespan? When devices are past their prime, are you dedicating extra costs into keeping them running? Budgeting for enterprise printer management is important here, too: Are you in the habit of pre-allocating funds for hardware replacement and upgrades?
• Looking to the future, not the status quo: Growing trends like mobile/BYOD printing and secure pull printing took many companies by surprise. As a result, their aging print environments couldn’t accommodate new technologies, putting them at a disadvantage. How future-proof is your print environment? Are you researching non-traditional print-management solutions to ensure that your print environment can easily adapt to changes to your workplace and workflow?
• Managing smarter, not harder: How does your organization handle basic enterprise printer management? Are you dependent on the service desk and technical support staff to perform routine printer installations, or are you empowering and engaging end users to do more on their own? Provisioning printers using group policy objects (GPOs) and scripts is common, but it’s not always the best—or only—method for targeted deployments.

Considering these factors, let’s consider your options. Outsourcing or consulting with a third-party company that specializes in enterprise printer management can help you optimize print management and save costs, but you may want to lay some important groundwork before handing the keys to your print environment over to an MSP.

Next-generation print-management solutions like PrinterLogic can play a vital role in your organization’s efforts to improve print processes and improve end-user satisfaction. PrinterLogic is a versatile, highly scalable solution that deploys rapidly, integrates seamlessly, and offers many benefits that conventional solutions simply can’t:

• Reduce print infrastructure and eliminate print servers altogether
• Centralize and simplify printer administration for the entire organization
• Configure print driver profiles so default settings are more economical but still offer users flexibility when needed
• Effortlessly deploy printers and drivers without GPOs and scripts
• Empower end users through a self-service printer installation portal
• Increase printing availability and dramatically reduce downtime
• Accelerate printing with virtual solutions like Citrix and VMware
• Future-proof your environment with advanced options like mobile/BYOD and secure pull printing
• Get print auditing and reporting capabilities for oversight and improved accountability
• Employ secure pull printing to cut down on wasteful printing and abandoned jobs

The proof is in the results. In a Citrix Virtual Apps/Virtual Desktops environment with a huge (3,400+) MSP-managed printer fleet, for example, UW Health saw a 70% overall decrease in print-related support costs after implementing PrinterLogic.

Or, learn how Helion Automotive Technologies reduced the time spent on print management, cut the time needed for print-server migrations to zero, and slashed printer downtime during daily operations—resulting in a threefold cost saving with PrinterLogic.

PrinterLogic’s unique approach to enterprise printer management has the power not only to cut costs, but to permanently optimize your entire print environment in ways that you never thought possible. Whether you need an on-prem solution or a SaaS edition such as PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud) we offer a free, full-featured demo and migration tool to help you test our solution in your environment. Try it for free for 30 days.

Posted by Cris Beagle

Progressive MSPs seek win-win partnerships
As Director of Technical Services at a fast-growing managed service provider, I’m always on the lookout for the best IT solutions I can find.

The reasons are twofold. First, best-in-class software improves our customers’ experience by providing the best solutions to their everyday problems. That has a halo effect on our brand as an MSP. Second, the best solutions make us more effective on the administrative side, where we can ensure a smooth end-user experience with the same—or fewer—resources.

Said another way, having the right partnerships allows us to be more responsive, more cost-effective, and more competitive. For MSPs and their customers, that’s a win–win scenario.

Challenge: split Citrix environments
Let’s start with a real-world example. Our first-ever customer is a healthcare provider that operates about 40 nursing homes across the U.S. Because they’re a distributed organization, they use a Citrix virtual environment to provide desktop services for their staff. That’s supplemented by centralized print servers and a fleet of 330 devices for printing. Within this environment, they also run an electronic medical records (EMR) solution called American HealthTech.

Several years ago, this customer faced a serious challenge. To accommodate their EMR software, their Citrix solution was configured so that some facilities were split between multiple Citrix environments. This created a lot of front-end and back-end fragmentation. And that split gave rise to printing issues, because the remote clients were either mapping all available network printers—or just the default local devices— depending on which Citrix server the client was connecting to.

It wasn’t just automatic printer mapping issues, either. We found printers that were triplicated in Active Directory, causing lots of confusion even if you tried doing things manually. Day-to-day printing was incredibly slow, too, given print jobs had to cross the WAN twice as they traveled from the remote client to the central print server, then back to the local printer.

Those problems were compounded by the kind of driver compatibility issues you encounter in a conventional print environment. Even when printer mapping was successful, there was no guarantee the operating system and the driver version would play well together.

The combined result was that our customer’s IT support personnel were fighting a losing battle with print-related tickets, and its end users were suffering through chronic printing problems.

Enter PrinterLogic
I had heard about PrinterLogic from an IT colleague, and I started looking into it. On paper, I was super impressed with what it could offer. Granular, administrative control of a direct-IP print environment from one pane of glass? Seamless integration with Microsoft AD and virtual environments like Citrix? A single, easily managed driver repository? Automated printer deployments based on precise criteria?

From the outset, it seemed like this solution could address all our printing problems in one fell swoop: driver incompatibility, unreliable printer mapping, slow printing, printing errors, you name it. I took the idea to Adam, our president, and he saw the promise of PrinterLogic right away.

We agreed to try it out. We rolled out PrinterLogic and we were amazed by the print-management transformation that occurred—especially considering the complexity of our customer’s environment.

To deliver printers to the customer’s staff, we began by configuring deployments based on IP scope, which is really easy in PrinterLogic’s web-based management console. If a user is in a particular IP scope, he or she gets all the printers for that site. This was well received by everyone, especially regional managers who travel between sites. When they logged into a new virtual session at another location, they instantly got access to all the printers at that facility. I’d call that a best-case scenario.

EMR-Citrix dexterity
What we found is that PrinterLogic plays as well with American HealthTech as it does with Citrix.

The EMR solution is delivered via a terminal server environment, so users still print through an RDS session—even though we’ve deployed a native desktop. PrinterLogic streamlined that situation, too. Even without PrinterLogic running in the terminal server environment, the printers map and print without trouble. It just works.

End users have seen a noticeable difference in the speed of printing, too. PrinterLogic’s direct-IP paradigm means that print jobs stay on the local network, traveling straight from the remote client to the local printer. With print jobs no longer crossing the WAN, network traffic is reduced, as well as the risk of printing errors and delays.

PrinterLogic: A scalable efficiency partner for MSPs
There’s no better way for an MSP to ramp up business than with a big success story. Our customer was relieved because their printing nightmares vanished almost overnight. Our staff was relieved, too, because PrinterLogic’s powerful admin console saved them from having to wrestle with GPOs, missing printers and problems at remote sites.

As our business grew, there were more opportunities to put PrinterLogic to work. The solution was so effective that we began using it as our go-to enterprise print-management solution. We rolled it out to customer after customer—simplifying their (and our) print environment as we went. Customers got the robust, reliable printing they’d always wanted, and we got print management that practically takes care of itself.

These days, the only reason for us to access PrinterLogic is to do a move/add/change, which is as easy for individual printers as it is for an entire fleet. Our service desk averages about 750 support tickets a month, and I’d be surprised if even five of them are print-related now.

PrinterLogic is also helping us stay on the cutting edge, and advance our cloud-first philosophy. With PrinterCloud, we enjoy a flexible, cost-effective SaaS print-management solution that offers close to 100 percent feature parity with the on-premises version. Which opens the door to additional success stories for us as an end-to-end MSP. As well as our customers.