The adoption of pull printing has really hit the mainstream in the past couple of years. In 2015, a study by research firm Quocirca found that 47% of all surveyed organizations had already deployed pull printing in some form or were planning to implement a pull-printing solution within the next year.

Based on our anecdotal experience here at PrinterLogic, interest in pull printing has certainly seen a rapid increase. These days it seems like many of our current and prospective customers have either rolled out pull-printing solutions or are actively looking for one. Part of that can be chalked up to the greater awareness (and risks) of data breaches and print vulnerabilities. Small wonder that, two years after its 2015 study, Quocirca published a paper recommending secure pull printing as an essential part of print security best practices.

Pull Printing: The Basics
For the uninitiated, pull printing generally looks like this: The user who wants a hard copy of a document clicks “Print” in the same way as they normally would. But instead of the print job winging its way to the selected printer to be printed out as soon as possible, it’s held in a special pull-printing queue. The user can then use a release mechanism, such as the printer’s control panel, to select and execute the job once they’re physically present at the printer. This second step can be performed at any printer that’s supported by whatever pull-printing solution the organization happens to have in place.

When the second step involves a stricter release mechanism that requires some form of user authentication, it’s sometimes qualified as secure pull printing. One common example of an authentication-based release is a PIN code or a badge/card reader such as CAC/PIV.

Pull-Printing Benefits
At first glance, this two-step process might seem inconvenient, but nothing could be further from the truth. When they’re designed and implemented correctly, pull-printing solutions are usually a win-win for everyone involved.

• More flexibility: Users get to choose their destination printer based on their actual circumstances. Ever sent a print job to Printer #1, then realized that it would have been much easier to pick it up at Printer #2? That happens all the time in large organizations, especially those with roaming and mobile users. One of the many pull-printing benefits is that users can release the job when they’re ready and in the most convenient spot.
• Less waste: It’s widely accepted that about 20% of print jobs end up in the recycle bin. This includes jobs that are printed by mistake, re-printed multiple times after minor edits are made, plus jobs that are forgotten and abandoned in the printer’s output tray—which, incidentally, is a huge security risk. The two-step pull-printing process makes printing more intentional, so that jobs are less likely to be abandoned. It also gives users a “delete” option if they realize their digital document needs more fine-tuning before being turned into hard copies.
• Increased security: The authentication mechanism that forms the basis of secure pull printing helps to ensure that the only eyes on a printing document belong to the end user who initiated the job. This is useful in HR departments, government agencies, as well as in EMR/EHR healthcare environments where confidentiality is of the utmost importance.

Implementing Your Pull-Printing Solution
If that’s piqued your interest in pull printing, well, here are the caveats. The nuts and bolts of implementing any pull-printing solution will depend on which solution you choose. Some are designed to work only with specific brands or models. Some might be wedded to a particular OS. They might offer most or even all of the pull-printing benefits outlined above, but it’s not guaranteed that those benefits will be available to every user in your organization. And it’s not safe to assume that the implementation will be seamless, even in an environment that meets all the solution’s basic requirements.

PrinterLogic’s secure pull-printing capability avoids those limitations, resulting in a single solution that can be deployed strategically across the organization to deliver all the pull-printing benefits without the usual list of caveats. Even managed service providers (MSPs) can use it across their entire customer base to add value to their services. As EPIC Management discovered, PrinterLogic’s pull-printing solution was versatile enough to be deployed seamlessly in its customers’ demanding healthcare environments, many of which were complex and Citrix-based, while also providing the security they needed to comply with guidelines on EMR and protected health information (PHI).

Secure pull printing from PrinterLogic works with three different release mechanisms—badge/card, control panel, and browser-based—to authenticate and execute pull-print jobs conveniently, efficiently and securely. To discover how effective it is in reducing print waste while introducing added print security and flexibility, download a full-featured trial of PrinterLogic and test it free of charge in your own environment for 30 days.

Posted by Ethan Janson

Back in October 2013, Windows Server 2012 R2 was released. It included a new and welcome feature called Branch Office Direct Printing, a feature that’s still available in Windows Server 2016.

Because high WAN utilization is an ongoing problem for distributed organizations with a centralized server infrastructure, Branch Office Direct Printing was designed to reduce network traffic across WAN connections by allowing client workstations at remote sites to make direct connections to local printers for faster and more reliable branch printing. In theory, this method of printing should also reduce the workload on the overtaxed central print servers by bypassing them entirely.

Great in Theory, Lackluster in Practice
Many IT professionals who’ve tried to implement Branch Office Direct Printing have run into some issues and realized that the reality doesn’t quite match the theory. To begin with, it requires both Windows 8 or 10 clients and a print server running Windows Server 2012 or 2016. With so many organizations still running Windows 7 clients, branch-office printing would force them into system-wide OS upgrades just to make use of a single benefit. Of course, managing printers on other operating systems like macOS and Linux is still out of the question as well. This implementation of branch-office printing also calls for printer drivers that support the client-side rendering (CSR) capability on which it relies.

Furthermore, while you could theoretically reduce your print server count by using Branch Office Direct Printing from a central server, there are no tools in place to help you migrate printers from one server to another, so most organizations still end up managing multiple print servers across multiple locations.

One (Possible) Step Forward, Three Steps Back
Then there’s lost functionality. Branch-office printing forfeits quota, auditing, and detailed job-logging capabilities. As Branch Office Direct Printing relies on CSR to handle print jobs, any server-side rendering (SSR) features would naturally be inaccessible with branch printing enabled.

Not to mention that some users have reported problems with Branch Office Direct Printing not working because of automatic fallbacks to SSR instead of CSR. An improper printer deployment or network error can cause clients to revert to SSR when they shouldn’t. If that happens, Branch Office Direct Printing is no longer operational, yet you might not realize that some of your clients have reverted to a traditional print-server setup with all its drawbacks.

In addition to those caveats, Microsoft makes no guarantees that Branch Office Direct Printing will reduce WAN traffic, speed up branch printing or improve scalability as intended.

PrinterLogic: Direct Client-to-Printer Connections by Design
To truly enjoy the benefits of Branch Office Direct Printing in Windows Server 2012 or 2016 without the long list of conditions and tradeoffs, there’s PrinterLogic. Optimized branch printing isn’t an added feature—it’s an integral part of our enterprise print-management solution.

By leveraging robust direct-IP technology, PrinterLogic enables you to eliminate the WAN traffic created by print jobs in all kinds of print environments, even those with hybrid OS clients. Have trouble managing printers for your macOS or Linux users? With PrinterLogic, it’s no longer a problem.

PrinterLogic automatically creates direct connections between endpoint devices and printers, which prevents print jobs from ever crossing the WAN. That reduction in print traffic helps reduce overall network congestion and accelerate branch-office printing. Additionally, PrinterLogic can integrate with your existing WAN caching technologies to avoid cross-WAN driver downloads, so you can push out company wide driver installs and updates without worrying about bogging down the WAN link to remote sites.

Zero Print Servers, Infinite Flexibility
Better still, PrinterLogic allows you to eliminate your print servers entirely—along with their attendant costs, infrastructure, and hassle. In their place you get increased branch printing functionality, centralized administration over every network printer from a single pane of glass, an intuitive user self-service portal for routine printer installations, the possibility to include modules for mobile/BYOD printing, comprehensive auditing capabilities and much more.

Figure 1: PrinterLogic combines the benefits of centralized management with efficient, direct IP printing

PrinterLogic comes in two flavors: An on-premises server hosted and managed by you or a SaaS-based option called PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud). Is your company moving to a cloud-first setup? Great! PrinterLogic can help. Does your organization prefer to host everything itself? No problem. Either way, you get an easy, fully functional print-management solution.

Give your preferred PrinterLogic solution a comprehensive test drive by signing up for our free, 30-day demo today.

Posted by Chris Poole

The total cost of printing (TCP) for any business can be a difficult figure to determine. Organizations might understand that it’s best practice to find new and effective ways to reduce printing costs, but they don’t always know exactly how much they’re spending on TCP in the first place. And that uncertainty can make it hard to identify where cost-saving opportunities exist.

Even organizations that use managed print services, whose providers often provide an itemized cost breakdown at the end of each quarter or month, can still be unaware of steps they can take to reduce printing costs and create a more cost-effective, streamlined print environment.

Although specifics vary from survey to survey and industry to industry, there are some general takeaways regarding TCP that apply to almost any organization, from enterprise-scale global companies to modestly sized SMBs.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that consumables like paper and toner only comprise a relatively small proportion of total print spending. A joint study by Citigroup and Environmental Defense in 2004 found that TCP is actually anywhere from 13 to 31 times the purchase price of paper alone. That figure is unlikely to have shifted much since then, as many organizations continue to rely on inefficient print-management solutions such as print servers.

But if consumables only account for a fraction—albeit still a significant one—of TCP, what are the other factors that impact the total cost of printing? As other in-depth printing studies have shown, these factors can be grouped under support, administration (or print management) and productivity. Being able to categorize them accordingly is helpful in developing practical strategies to reduce printing costs.

Support: A 2011 report sponsored by Xerox noted that the average cost of a helpdesk call is between $20 and $25. That accounts for the time the support rep spends troubleshooting the issue as well as the productivity sacrificed by the employee to make the call.

Though it might not sound like a king’s ransom, when those $25 instances are multiplied by all the helpdesk calls in an organization—between 35% and 50% of which are print-related, according to the same study—the aggregate costs can really add up.

Administration: One estimate puts administration’s contribution to TCP at close to 60%. This includes print-management tasks like printer installation and configuration as well as driver management.

The larger and more complex the organization, the more cumbersome print administration tends to be. In response, organizations have to remunerate existing IT staff for the excessive workload or hire and train additional IT professionals. The cost of overtime or additional full-time employees (FTEs) just to handle print management is a major driver of administration’s high proportion of TCP.

Productivity: Having to call the helpdesk isn’t the only way in which end users can get pulled away from their work. Productivity is also lost when the print-management software crashes or the print server has to be rebooted on account of spooler or driver issues.

One Gartner study pegged the cost of network downtime at $42,000 per hour for enterprise-scale organizations. That figure was largely corroborated by a 2011 survey by CA Technologies, which found that, depending on their size, companies lost on average anywhere from $55,000 up to $1,000,000 each year due to IT failures, including print downtime.

With this in mind, we’d like to offer our own tips to reduce printing costs by implementing PrinterLogic.

How PrinterLogic Helps to Reduce Printing Costs
The centrally managed, direct-IP printing model of PrinterLogic’s advanced print-management software brings next-generation efficiency to any print environment. Both its low-footprint on-premises solution and its SaaS cloud-based solution allow organizations to eliminate print servers from the moment of implementation, which saves them the perpetual costs of maintenance, operation and upgrade.

Take BankPlus, for example. This Mississippi-based community bank leveraged PrinterLogic to eliminate 65 print servers throughout its highly distributed organization, putting an end to the servers’ ongoing expense and lack of reliability without forsaking print functionality.

And that’s just one of many ways that BankPlus reduced printing costs with PrinterLogic. As the bank eliminated print servers, it discovered that calls about downtime, driver issues, printer installations and printing problems vanished along with them.

BankPlus isn’t alone. Time and time again, our print-management software solutions have been shown to lead to drastic reductions in the number of print-related help-desk calls thanks to the power of managed direct-IP printing. PrinterLogic’s seamless integration with any environment and end-user empowerment through its self-service installation portal nips perennial print-management challenges in the bud.

By achieving higher end-user productivity through unparalleled uptime, more efficient administration with a centralized and intuitive management console, and less need for print-related IT support as a result of all the above, PrinterLogic can help organizations of any size reduce printing costs and shrink TCP more than they ever thought possible. PrinterLogic’s native mobile and BYOD printing capabilities can then bring even further gains as workplaces continue to evolve.

Whether your organization uses managed print services or relies on a single individual to handle every aspect of its print management, PrinterLogic can provide multiple ways to reduce printing costs and drive down TCP beyond merely cutting back on consumables usage (although, yes, it does that too). Download a free 30-day trial today to experience the ROI-generating potential of PrinterLogic yourself.

Secure printing should be an essential practice and integral part of document workflows throughout an enterprise—especially in the kinds of departments that deal with sensitive data, such as HR or R&D. While many organizations understand this, the number of organizations with secure-printing protocols in place remains relatively small.

Why is that? Well, even though there’s little doubt regarding the importance of printing security, implementation has typically been more challenging.

One of the biggest obstacles is that secure-printing solutions typically involve a tradeoff between security and ease of use. If, for instance, ease of use takes a backseat to security, it will negatively affect the admin who’s tasked with setting up secure printing just as much as the end user who makes use of enterprise document printing on a daily basis.

For similar reasons, secure-printing solutions don’t always integrate well with existing print environments. Heterogeneous printer fleets might be incompatible with the solution’s approach to printing security, or a complex infrastructure with mixed operating systems might be unable to fully support certain software requirements. This has led to a situation in which many organizations are still unaware of what secure-printing options are available to them, leading to skepticism or hesitation toward adopting adequate solutions in the enterprise community.

Here are three handy tips to help enterprises identify secure-printing solutions that are right for them.

1. Remember that security and ease of use are complementary, not mutually exclusive.
Imagine a door with a hundred locks. Sounds pretty secure, right? But if you have to pass through that door multiple times per day, how often do you think you’ll open and close each one of those locks? Or is it more likely that the door will simply get left open for the sake of convenience?

Secure-printing mechanisms that require the end user to complete multiple authorization and approval steps are subject to the same problem. At the time of printing, users make an instant cost-benefit assessment about time and effort involved, and any extra steps can act as a deterrent to choosing the secure option. That’s how human nature can foil your best attempt at hardening printing security.

Instead, make printing security an attractive option for your end users. PrinterLogic’s secure-printing solution uses an intuitive two-step release procedure that can easily become part of any printing workflow. Our release printing mechanism gives users greater control over where and how their documents are printed, so they’re more likely to make secure enterprise document printing their preferred method.

2. Choose a secure-printing solution that integrates fully and seamlessly.
When a secure-printing solution is bolted onto your existing print environment, it creates gaps that can be exploited by malicious intent. This lack of seamlessness can also drive up the time and labor investment for your IT staff, forcing them to limit the number of printers or users with secure-printing functionality. Both of those qualities can compromise the integrity of your printing security approach.

PrinterLogic’s pull-printing module integrates seamlessly with your print environment and can give secure enterprise document printing capabilities to most printers—including legacy devices. This eliminates the typical hardware and software limitations and makes secure-printing functionality a natural extension of your current and future printing infrastructure.

3. Pick the secure-printing option that’s right for you.
Best-in-class secure-printing solutions won’t restrict you to a single release protocol. With PrinterLogic, you can choose from three authentication methods to release print jobs.

• Badge/card reader release: A connected or integrated badge reader works smoothly alongside your organization’s existing RFID or CAC/PIV card setup, allowing users to authenticate and release the print jobs at the associated printer.
• Printer control panel release: PrinterLogic’s embedded app can be installed directly on supported printers. Users can then login and release their print jobs right from the printer’s control panel using their Active Directory ID or a user-created PIN.
• Browser-based release: Any device with a web browser, including a tablet, can access PrinterLogic’s web-based release portal, enabling users to release their print jobs conveniently and securely.

Enterprise printing security with PrinterLogic
By keeping those three tips in mind, you can add the necessary printing security to your enterprise document printing workflow yet avoid the usual drawbacks and compromises of lesser solutions.

PrinterLogic is a single solution that allows you to harden your print environment while retaining flexibility, usability and control. In addition to the benefits described above, our centralized console and powerful secure-printing features provide administrators complete oversight of badges in use, the locations of print jobs generated and who sends them, as well as the type authentication method used.

Best of all, you don’t have to guess if PrinterLogic is the ideal secure-printing solution for your environment. We offer a free 30-day trial period that allows you to test all the features of our acclaimed print-management solution, including printing security. Sign up for the demo today and see how you can lock down enterprise document printing without inconveniencing your end users.

Fun fact: At Wipfli, we print on the order of 16 million pages annually. We’re CPAs and consultants with a 60,000+ client base that spans the globe, so maybe all that paperwork comes with the territory. Suffice it to say, we know a thing or two about printing on an enterprise scale.

Our organization had a wake-up call a few years ago when we started transitioning all of our Windows Server 2003 print servers to Windows Server 2012. During the migration process, we suddenly became aware of how much time and energy our IT team was sinking into managing printing—not just as a part of occasional server migrations, but every single day. This prompted us to start looking into print-management solutions.

That’s when we first came across PrinterLogic which was an eye-opening discovery for us. Seeing the demo completely changed how I thought about print management and the outdated ways we were providing print capabilities to the firm.

Piloting PrinterLogic
We started by rolling out PrinterLogic to two Wipfli offices as a pilot project.

What we found was that it worked more or less right out of the box—even with our specialized tax software. In the past, we had to configure separate print queues on each print server every time a user wanted to use different driver settings in the tax software.

With PrinterLogic, associates didn’t encounter those same printing difficulties with the tax software. After the pilot, we asked them which method they preferred, the old way or the pilot of PrinterLogic; they all chose PrinterLogic. They were particularly impressed with the self-service installation portal, which enabled them to find the printer closest to them using an internal, web-based floor plan map and install it with a mouse click.

Based on the initial success of the pilot, we opted to take PrinterLogic organization-wide.

Eliminating dozens of print servers
At the time of our Windows Server 2003 to 2012 migration, we were running 40 print servers, about one for each of our physical locations. They supplied printing services to our approximately 2,000 associates and our 400-device printer fleet.

As soon as PrinterLogic’s print-management solution provided us with real-world proof that a distributed organization like ours could enjoy robust printing capabilities without the need for print servers, we had another eureka moment. Once you realize print servers are unnecessary, you begin to take stock of all the time and costs associated with managing print servers, patching, rebooting, routine maintenance, keeping them all up to date and secure, and so on.

Wipfli’s continued growth meant that our print-server infrastructure would keep expanding with no end in sight, compounding the hassle and expense—along with the risk of single points of failure; the print servers themselves located in each office. In addition, with our robust merger and acquisition strategy, every new location would require another server to deploy, maintain, monitor and upgrade.

By eliminating our need for print servers, PrinterLogic gave us an enterprise-class printing solution that would scale indefinitely yet retain a tiny infrastructural footprint. These days, when we perform a merger or acquisition, it takes less than an hour to bring all of that location’s printers into our print environment. As a bonus, we no longer have to worry about spooler crashes and print server downtime.

Winning over clients with PrinterLogic SaaS
Along with our CPA practice and our many consulting and business advisory services, Wipfli also has a Technology Management team that provides technology related consulting and managed services to a wide range of clients.

After our overwhelmingly positive experience with PrinterLogic’s on-premises solution for Wipfli internally, I recommended it to our Tech Management consulting team and they began recommending and implementing PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud) for our clients who were struggling with their own print environments. PrinterLogic SaaS is a flexible, software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that offers feature parity with PrinterLogic. That made it ideal for smaller clients who were working to pare down their physical infrastructure to the absolute basics and move toward an Azure-hosted cloud-based environment.

PrinterLogic SaaS has enabled those clients to get rid of a lot of dead weight as far as print infrastructure is concerned while gaining more flexibility and oversight in their printing. Like our own users, our Tech Management clients have been excited to discover that centrally managed direct-IP printing is a viable enterprise solution, and they’ve been thrilled with the results of its implementation.

The long and short of it is, we’ve experienced so many benefits with PrinterLogic that we now consider the use of print servers to be hopelessly outdated. We’re no longer approaching print management the way we used to. After implementing PrinterLogic’s print-management solutions, we have more control over our print environment, increased uptime, more insight into print activity through reporting, seamless printing with our tax-management software, infinite scalability and satisfied tech-consulting clients. Those are some incredible gains from a single solution provider.

As if the trend toward mobile printing weren’t enough for organizations to deal with, there’s a growing subset of mobile users who require bring-your-own-device (BYOD) printing and guest printing capabilities.

Unlike users with company-issued mobile devices, which usually have some degree of uniformity, BYOD and guest users have the potential to introduce an enormous range of devices into the print environment. These devices can differ not only in terms of manufacturer and model but also in terms of OS and installed apps.

As a result, the challenge in accommodating these users in any print environment becomes twofold. One is the basic mechanics of how to enable guest and BYOD printing without introducing extra infrastructure or adding to the IT department’s already heavy workload. The second is how to print securely from these devices.

Fully addressing those two aspects using conventional print-management solutions can be difficult and unnecessarily complex, if not impossible. With PrinterLogic’s next-generation print-management software, however, organizations of all sizes can implement easy-to-use, platform-agnostic BYOD and guest printing while still ensuring that their mobile printing remains tightly controlled and secure. That combination makes for three strong benefits:

1. Mobile printing that’s easy for admins as well as the end user
The fundamental PrinterLogic advantage in guest printing is its simplicity. Our centralized approach to enterprise printing allows administrators to oversee and manage the entire print environment from a single pane of glass. That gives them the ability to conveniently set up universal BYOD-printing capabilities that extend throughout the entire organization but can be en- and disabled on a per-printer basis. Even legacy network printers can be given mobile printing functionality.

For the BYOD or guest user, it’s easy to execute a print job from any mobile device. All they have to do is tap the “Share” button on their file or document and then select the PrinterLogic printer. That means iOS and Android printing is a consistent experience without the need for printers that specifically support those platforms. In addition to providing an intuitive print process for the end user, this saves the organization from having to invest in additional, expensive devices that only support a particular brand of mobile printing.

In the event that the guest or BYOD user is unable to use the “Share” menu (they’re off-network, for example), they can use PrinterLogic’s email-to-print feature, which makes guest printing no different to sending an email. In this digital printing scenario, the user simply emails the files to be printed to a printer’s dedicated email address. It then enters the queue like any other job.

2. Tight control over the who, what, where and how of guest printing
Because of the need for secure printing in many companies, that incredible level of simplicity is complemented by an incredible level of control. Admins can authorize precisely which users and which printers have guest and BYOD printing capabilities. They can set even more granular limits such as permitted file types, color or monochrome digital printing and print quotas.

Here, too, PrinterLogic’s centralized console plays an important role—not just in the ease of configuration but also in monitoring print activity across the enterprise.

3. Convenient mobile print security without compromises
Sometimes the weakest point in mobile print security is the users themselves. It’s not that your end users don’t want to print securely; it’s that they often don’t know how to print securely. PrinterLogic’s BYOD printing makes it convenient for them to do so through an easy-to-understand, optional release mechanism.

Once a BYOD or guest user sends their job to the central mobile printing queue, they can execute that job on any authorized printer by manually selecting the job on PrinterLogic’s web-based release portal. This two-step process, which leverages pull printing, helps to ensure that the user is deliberately sending the job to the right printer and is prepared to collect it. As a side benefit, it also reduces consumables usage by cutting down on print jobs that are initiated and then abandoned.

Test PrinterLogic’s BYOD printing in your own print environment
Whether your organization is specifically in need of iOS or Android printing or is looking to implement a more universal BYOD printing solution, PrinterLogic’s enterprise print-management software with integrated mobile printing is the optimal way to achieve that goal. If you’d like to test the on-prem version of our solution in your print environment for 30 days, sign up today for a free demo, or try our SaaS cloud-based solution, PrinterCloud.