Posted by Joel Brooks

This is a “part two” to my earlier guest blog describing our experience with PrinterLogic at Navicent Health, a large nonprofit healthcare corporation based in Georgia.

In that post, I talked about how PrinterLogic enabled us to consolidate several virtual pools that we had been forced to create in our VMware environment in order to provide printing capabilities to our staff in remote medical facilities. I also mentioned that we had experimented—and struggled—with a competing software solution in the face of those challenges.

A lot of that was due to how that particular printing solution, like many others, relies on Group Policy for printer deployments.

Now, I fully recognize that Group Policy has its place in enterprise IT. But I’m also of the opinion that you’re better off when you keep Group Policy to an absolute minimum. Many of us—especially those of us in the healthcare industry—administer environments that are in constant flux, and Group Policy just can’t adapt fast enough. It becomes an obstacle to administration rather than a tool.

Another obstacle is the last thing you want in a high-stakes VDI environment.

Moving beyond Group Policy
Instead of using Group Policy to push certain printers to a certain terminal, PrinterLogic handles the configuration and execution of deployment itself. You just make the printer-client association in the web-based console, and that’s it. There’s no voodoo involved in the setup or crossing your fingers each time a user logs on and hoping for a successful deployment.

That makes our end users’ jobs easier. With all the other responsibilities they’re juggling, they don’t want to fight with their printer; they just want to be able to print. Not having to worry about printing means they can focus their energy on our core business: patient care.

Eliminating Group Policy with PrinterLogic makes IT’s job easier too.

In our own organization, for example, our remote technicians have access to PrinterLogic’s management console. Should a thin-client terminal conk out or need replacing, they can simply install a new terminal and update the hostname in PrinterLogic. There’s no need for them to call anyone with higher-level access, and the end users can be up and running with the new terminal with zero printing interruption.

Even more ease of management
With PrinterLogic, the same benefits we see from eliminating Group Policy extend to day-to-day management.

At Navicent, we have a managed service provider (MSP) who has to swap out printers or update device firmware from time to time. In the past, if the MSP made changes like that without also updating the name of the device or changing its drivers on the print server, it would put us at risk of all kinds of problems. In a VMware environment like ours, I would have to delete the printer, re-add it, recompose the virtual pool and hope everything worked.

That’s all changed now with PrinterLogic. Updates in the management console are reflected instantly and are pushed out to all the associated devices. So if we change the name of a printer, the thin clients are quietly and seamlessly alerted to that change. The clients don’t end up hunting for printers that don’t exist. And neither do the end users.

Thanks to the consolidation of our VDI environment and the elimination of Group Policy, we’re no longer wasting unnecessary time on printing and print management. The staff at our hospitals and medical centers can roam and print without a second thought, and IT staff like me can concentrate on our other duties. Based on the time and headache we’ve saved, PrinterLogic has paid for itself.

Managing one print environment can be hard enough. Managing several at the same time can seem downright daunting. And for managed service providers (MSPs) whose cost structures are highly sensitive to extra investment of time and resources, every second spent struggling with a print-management issue has the potential to weigh heavily on the bottom line.

MSPs have another fundamental concern: customer satisfaction. Unlike an organization where print infrastructure is managed in-house, an MSP’s end users can decide to contract with another provider at any time. That puts particular importance on retaining existing customers and attracting new ones, which means that quality of service has to remain uncompromisingly high. Ongoing printing problems, even minor ones that might be tolerated elsewhere, can put an MSP out of business.

The catch here is that, in addition to facing more than the usual number of challenges, MSPs also have a unique set of print-management requirements. Ideally, they want a single, uniform print-management solution that allows them to deliver a core suite of services to their customers while also providing a consistent management experience. Yet MSPs’ customers can have very different environments and a wide variety of printing needs, so any solution also has to be versatile enough to accommodate these disparities.

Bearing that in mind, a print-management solution that’s optimized for MSPs should meet the following criteria:

• Powerful: Admins have access to a comprehensive suite of printer- and driver-management tools, including advanced features.
• Intuitive: Profile settings as well as automated deployments and installations are easy to configure with granular precision.
• Versatile: The solution integrates seamlessly with any environment without sacrificing reliability, functionality or ease of use.
• Robust: Single points of failure and WAN dependencies are either reduced or eliminated completely, ensuring maximum uptime and uninterrupted printing.
• Centralized: The MSP is able to fully manage the print environment for every customer, no matter how distributed, from a single pane of glass.
• Consistent: The administrative experience is the same across the entire customer pool, regardless of differences in printer fleets or printing habits.
• Streamlined: Administrative tasks are as efficient as possible and don’t require multiple interactions when one will do.
• Scalable: The print-management solution effortlessly adapts as the customer’s print environment shrinks, expands or evolves over time.

Another thing to consider is that any print-management solution that is truly geared toward MSPs should also offer opportunities to add value. For example, one customer might want secure printing capabilities, whereas another wants to implement cross-platform mobile and BYOD printing. An MSP who’s able to provide this kind of added value in a cost-effective way—that is, with minimal physical infrastructure and low administrative overhead—is going to be much more attractive to those customers.

PrinterLogic meets these demanding MSP criteria
Although traditional print-management solutions like print servers would find it impossible to fulfill all those demanding criteria, PrinterLogic’s enterprise print-management solutions are able to meet them without reservation.

Our next-generation software uniquely combines the simplicity and reliability of direct-IP printing with the power of centralized management, enabling MSPs to manage the print environments of their entire customer pool from a single web-based console. This also gives PrinterLogic core capabilities like eliminating print servers, advanced printer deployments without the need for GPOs or scripts, self-service printer installations, and seamless integration alongside virtual solutions.

That’s not just theoretical. MSPs like Helion Automotive Technologies and Strata Information Technology have implemented PrinterLogic’s low-footprint, on-premises software solution for their customers in very different sectors. Helion, for instance, focuses on the automotive industry, supplying 650 car dealerships and their 28,000 employees with core IT services. Strata IT, on the other hand, draws some of its largest customers from the healthcare industry.

In each case, both MSPs saw a massive reduction in the time spent on print management after implementing PrinterLogic. Strata IT immediately experienced an estimated 50% drop in print-related support tickets, whereas Helion has leveraged PrinterLogic to cut 20 hours off each of its regular print-server migrations. The two MSPs also cited increased customer satisfaction as a result of their increased responsiveness, the reduced number of routine printing problems and the improved visibility into new areas of the print environment, such as consumable costs.

The next-gen features you expect from a next-gen solution
PrinterLogic also offers a SaaS counterpart called PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud). This zero-footprint, cloud-based solution offers feature parity with PrinterLogic’s proven on-premises software, giving MSPs and their customers the option of a flexible, enterprise-grade print-management solution that is infinitely scalable and incredibly cost-effective. Pioneer Technology is just one MSP that is using PrinterLogic SaaS to further its “cloud-first” philosophy and retain a competitive edge among its peers in the banking, healthcare and retail industries.

And when it comes to adding value, both of PrinterLogic’s solutions are able to provide native pull printing and mobile printing capabilities along with comprehensive print auditing tools. This kind of advanced functionality is increasingly sought after by organizations that are looking to harden their print security, provide tightly controlled but full-featured printing to their BYOD users, or gain insight into printing habits for the sake of cost-cutting and efficiency.

Sign up for a full-featured demo today to experience the advantages of PrinterLogic’s next-generation centrally managed direct-IP printing. You can test our solution at no cost for 30 days and see how it can transform print management for you and your customers.

Posted by Joel Brooks

I work as an Information Services Technician Level III for Navicent Health, a nonprofit healthcare corporation that provides a wide range of care across a large network of hospitals and care centers throughout central Georgia.

We have about 5,000 employees and, as you can probably imagine, a large printer fleet of about 1,500 devices that includes copy machines, multi-function devices and label printers.

Before we discovered PrinterLogic, one of our primary printing problems involved our VMware thin-client VDI environment. To get printing to work between VMware and PowerWorks, our electronic medical records (EMR) solution, we had to create separate virtual machine pools around on the printer they used. We would locally embed printers into a virtual parent image and deploy that image to those pools. Virtual thin-client terminals would then get their printers depending on the pool they joined.

That meant we had multiple virtual environments for one location. It wasn’t easy to administer, but we probably could have lived with it if it worked.

Except it didn’t. A physician might log into one terminal, pull up the chart for his next patient, then walk twenty feet down the hall to the room where the patient was waiting. If the terminal in that room was in a different pool, his session wouldn’t follow him. He would have to pull up the patient chart all over again.

Because of the hoops we had to jump through just to set up printing, we lost our roaming capability. We were also making daily onsite support visits for issues that we should have been able to manage remotely.

Which kind of defeats the point of having a VDI solution at all.

Searching for solutions
At first we tried using a software printing solution to address our clustered virtual environment, but that only led to a new set of problems. I remember struggling with it and its deployment protocols, and the technician that came out to advise us only ended up confusing us more. The diagram he drew to demonstrate our ideal setup looked like a John Madden play-by-play.

I’d had a great experience with PrinterLogic at my previous employer, which was another large healthcare organization with a virtual environment, so I recommended that we give PrinterLogic a try here at Navicent.

We set up a PrinterLogic demo server. After three weeks of unsuccessfully trying to configure the prior solution, we were up and running with PrinterLogic within thirty minutes.

No more clusters, no more onsite visits
PrinterLogic enabled us to consolidate our virtual clusters—our primary printing and administrative headache—almost instantly.

What does that look like on the ground?

It means that the medical staff log in first thing in the morning, get their virtual session, and that virtual session stays with them the entire day. As soon as they tap out of a terminal and tap in again, the same session that they had pulls up with all the right information. They can badge in and out everywhere. There’s no thirty-minute wait for Windows to build their profile. And they can always print to a local printer. We now have true, seamless roaming.

Along with streamlining our VMware environment, we also saw our print-related support calls drop to almost nothing. I used to get multiple calls a day from perturbed physicians asking why they had to log in over and over again and start fresh each time. Since implementing PrinterLogic, I go months between support calls.

When I first started, I was going down to our remote locations every day trying to fix printers or virtual environments. Not anymore. Onsite visits are more like a casual friendly check-in.

PrinterLogic didn’t just stop at simplifying VDI printing. It also solved our deployment issues by eliminating group policy requirements. That’s something I’ll describe in more detail in a follow-up post.