A December 2018 study found that 85% of companies are already reporting moderate to extensive production use of cloud infrastructure, and industry analysts predict that 83% of enterprise workloads will be cloud-based by 2020. The move to the cloud is no longer a cutting-edge trend; It’s a mainstream practice that permeates nearly every enterprise IT strategy.

Even as companies transition their traditional on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, there’s still the potential to fall back into old habits—starting with the migration itself. Many organizations tend to take a lift-and-shift approach, which more or less moves components from the current infrastructure to a cloud-based solution.

That might be convenient (at first) but it also runs the risk of retaining many of the drawbacks of the previous solution. In some cases, it’s like putting an old engine in a new vehicle. Nowhere is that analogy more appropriate than with legacy technology such as print servers.

Instead of migrating print servers to the cloud, why not fully eliminate physical infrastructure from your environment and move to a flexible and scalable print-management platform that’s easier to administer, more robust, and more transparent to your end users? I’m talking about a PrinterLogic solution called PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud).

The drawbacks of migrating server-based printing
Before looking more closely at PrinterLogic SaaS, let’s review the shortcomings of server-based printing—shortcomings that continue in the cloud. Admins have lived with these drawbacks so long that they’ve come to accept them as an inevitable part of enterprise printing. Calling them out here will help clarify what organizations stand to gain from a serverless printing platform built around centrally managed direct-IP printing.

• Yesterday’s technology in tomorrow’s environment: Despite marginal improvements like driver isolation, print servers are an infrastructure model that has run its course. Moving these servers to the cloud either puts this outdated, cumbersome software model in a new location or it requires organizations to keep remote branch-office servers in place. Both of those scenarios prevent you from realizing the true potential of the cloud.
• Licensing and maintenance don’t go away: Even with the physical server removed, print servers can still have steep ongoing licensing costs. If branch-office print servers remain, those servers have to be maintained and occasionally upgraded too. That can negatively impact the anticipated overall cost savings of a cloud migration.
• Print jobs “escape” the local network: Similar to centralized print servers in distributed environments, print jobs leave the local network when the server moves to the cloud. This “escape” exposes your confidential data to possible data breach, and security is a number-one concern for cloud migration to begin with. The client-to-cloud relay required for each and every print job also risks affecting the speed and reliability of printing, which can cause end users to sour quickly.
• Print servers are single points of failure: Speaking of angry end users, think back to the last time the print spooler crashed or a rogue driver affected the print queue. Even with several layers of redundancy in place, cloud-based print servers are still vulnerable to these issues. Print availability also suffers if the WAN or VPN connection is interrupted.
• There’s no avoiding group policy and scripts: If they could, many admins would like to eliminate the need for GPOs and scripting in printer deployments. Unfortunately, print servers rely heavily on these deployment methods, which can be unreliable, inflexible and difficult to configure even at the best of times.

Figure 1: Migrating print servers to the cloud retains single points of failure and reduces print security.

Simply migrating print servers to the cloud can compound the complexity of your print infrastructure—and some of these issues as a result. What that boils down to is more time spent troubleshooting, more resources devoted to print management, and more burden on the support team as they field more print-related help-desk calls.

PrinterLogic SaaS is powerful, secure, platform-agnostic serverless printing
When organizations move to the cloud, they’re hoping to achieve an ideal combination of lower costs, greater ease of use, more flexibility and less physical infrastructure. PrinterLogic SaaS is the enterprise printing solution that delivers on all those counts.

• Serverless and secure: PrinterLogic SaaS is hosted in a proven, secure AWS infrastructure. It enables your organization to eliminate print servers completely—​even from branch offices—while gaining functionality, scalability and stability.
• A model for the future: Thanks to a centrally managed direct-IP printing paradigm, PrinterLogic SaaS limits WAN dependency by establishing one-to-one connections between clients and printers. Admins can oversee the entire environment from a single pane of glass while users enjoy efficient, reliable printing.
• No GPOs, no scripts: Coupled with its seamless integration with Active Directory, PrinterLogic SaaS’s intuitive admin console and centralized driver repository allow admins to manage printers and drivers easily. That includes configuring advanced, ultra-precise printer deployments to target specific users or entire groups without any need for GPOs or scripts.
• Empowers end users: With optional features like a self-service installation portal, mobile printing and pull (or secure-release) printing, PrinterLogic SaaS helps organizations safely equip their employees with sought-after functionality that unlocks their productivity. There are even smartphone apps for easily releasing held print jobs (iOS and Android).
• Truly cross-platform: PrinterLogic SaaS natively supports Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems. This is ideal for hybrid environments that are running several versions of one OS or a mix of all the above. It also integrates smoothly with Citrix and VMware solutions to enhance their native printing functionality.
• Reduces support costs at their source: To improve ease of management, increase print availability, and dramatically lower the number of print-related help-desk calls, PrinterLogic SaaS transforms enterprise printing at its core by uniting familiar printing methods with next-generation administration and capabilities. Together these make for a single cost-effective printing solution.

Figure 2: PrinterLogic SaaS provides a serverless, secure, and highly available printing environment.

Whether your organization is planning a full migration, a hybrid cloud/on-prem approach, or is starting fresh, PrinterLogic SaaS makes it easy to eliminate print servers once and for all in favor of a superior centrally managed direct-IP printing infrastructure. It turns migration into the perfect opportunity to move your print environment beyond the status quo.

Furthermore, PrinterLogic takes any guesswork out of implementing PrinterLogic SaaS by offering a free 30-day trial. Before you start migrating, sign up today and thoroughly test drive our serverless SaaS printing solution in your own organization.

Printing continues to be a mission-critical capability in modern workplaces, even as those workplaces have fundamentally changed in line with wider social and technological trends. Today, mobile and BYOD devices are much more ubiquitous and far more capable than they were ten years ago, and employees’ attitudes have shifted toward what they expect from IT—something that applies to both support and infrastructure. As a result, and despite the printing process itself being a constant over the decades, the qualities and features that organizations of any size should look for in their print-management software have evolved.

The catch is that most print-management solutions haven’t evolved accordingly.

In the enterprise, it’s still common to see print servers forming the backbone of the print infrastructure. Sure, they’re single points of failure, they require GPOs and rights management for most deployments, their driver management fluctuates between poor and terrible, and they offer little in the way of advanced functionality like mobile printing. Yes, they’re inefficient, frustrating, unreliable, full of limitations and compromises. But they’re the status quo, and the familiarity of the status quo is what imbues it with staying power in the face of change.

Bearing that in mind, maybe it’s time to reassess what organizations should look for in their print-management software.

Is it designed for today and tomorrow?
One of the most important characteristics of a print-management solution is that it should meet the needs of your current environment while also providing a platform that’s versatile enough to anticipate future changes and challenges. Traditional print-management paradigms like print servers just aren’t up to that task.

PrinterLogic’s serverless print-management software integrates seamlessly into your existing print environment with a minimal footprint (or zero footprint in the case of our PrinterCloud SaaS solution) and almost effortless migration. Our migration tool actually takes the print queues, printer objects, profiles and drivers on your current print servers and imports them quickly and smoothly into PrinterLogic. That means you can be up and running with a PrinterLogic deployment in record time with no interruption to end users’ print activity.

Once PrinterLogic is implemented, you can continue running our print-management software alongside your old print servers. Or, better still, you can eliminate your print servers altogether, reducing infrastructure, costs of maintenance and administrative overhead in the process. PrinterLogic’s impressive scalability then allows your organization to grow without the need to add the infrastructure and personnel required by conventional print-management solutions.

Does it natively support advanced features?
When organizations want to add functionality such as print reporting or pull printing, they typically resort to discrete third-party solutions. This is how print environments become a high-maintenance patchwork of software that’s difficult to manage and often requires hacks and workarounds to function as a cohesive whole.

PrinterLogic natively supports optional features that include BYOD and guest printing, secure pull printing, mobile printing and print auditing. Unlike layered or bolt-on solutions, these are more like seamless extensions of PrinterLogic’s core functionality. They introduce premium features to the print environment without the usual investment of administrative time and cost.

For example, with mobile printing, users can print natively from iOS and Android smartphones and tablets to any network printer—including legacy devices—without the need to provision or install any client-side software. They can then easily view and release jobs to the most convenient printer through the PrinterLogic Print Release App. Meanwhile, guests and BYOD users can use the convenient email-to-print capabilities in PrinterLogic’s mobile printing to send print jobs to local printers, regardless of whether they’re on- or off-network.

Will it simplify print management?
Instead of streamlining print management, many solutions add unnecessary complexity to the print environment. Our serverless solution instead grew out of the idea that comprehensive control and simplicity aren’t mutually exclusive, and that the most valuable solutions empower admins and end users alike to get their jobs done.

On the admin side of things, PrinterLogic provides a centralized management console that can be used to monitor and administer the entire print environment from a single pane of glass. Through this console, admins can manage drivers across the organization, adjust default settings with granular precision and deploy printers to individuals or whole groups of users. PrinterLogic also eliminates the need for GPOs and scripts, so deployments can be carried out with pinpoint accuracy but without the usual configuration headaches.

The end-user experience is just as hassle-free. PrinterLogic’s self-service installation portal is a web-based tool that enables end users to identify and install nearby printers—along with any associated drivers—with a single click. There’s no need for them to call the help desk or waste time digging through device trees to map their own printers. This is just one reason why Strata IT (read the case study here) as well as other managed service providers (MSPs) have found PrinterLogic to be unique among print-management solutions in terms of its time- and cost-saving potential.

Want to gain a better understanding of how PrinterLogic is the single answer to what to look for in print-management software? Just sign up for and download a free trial of our serverless enterprise printing solution to test it in your print environment for 30 days.

Cloud computing has almost everyone rethinking how they approach technology. CTOs, sysadmins and other IT professionals are increasingly aware of what their organizations stand to gain from reducing their physical infrastructure, centralizing management and streamlining how IT services are delivered to their end users. That in turn has prompted many of them to take a fresh look at virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions like Citrix and VMware.

With VDI solutions comes the perceived challenge of VDI printing. Implementing an enterprise-scale VDI solution and migrating an entire organization to a virtual platform can seem daunting enough. When you combine that with lingering concerns over how exactly VMware or Citrix printing will work, even in very basic print environments, the uncertainty can cause organizations to wonder whether virtualization is truly right for them. That doubt could be what prevents them from enjoying the very real benefits of going virtual.

So how can you be sure that your organization is prepared for VDI printing?

First, let’s take a moment to recap virtual printing and why it can be so tricky.

Virtual desktops provide end users with a consistent, centrally managed computing experience. This makes VDI ideal for organizations of all kinds, but it’s a model that is especially well suited to organizations that are geographically distributed or that have inherently dynamic workplaces. The session-based (as opposed to workstation-based) nature of this computing paradigm allows for greater flexibility while consolidating and simplifying administrative control over multi-location environments.

Printing, on the other hand, is still very much rooted in the workstation-centric computing model. It tends to work best with direct connections that rarely see any change. Standard VDI print solutions try their best to overcome this reliability gap. Unfortunately, there are so many variables to account for when trying to get a virtual desktop to print to a local printer that it’s never quite as straightforward as it should be.

As a result, admins often end up struggling to choose the right option from the available print-management solutions—only to find that they all have an Achilles heel.

How PrinterLogic enhances VDI printing
Unlike the vast majority of VDI print solutions and conventional print-management solutions, PrinterLogic doesn’t try to replace the native printing capabilities of your Citrix or VMware environment. Trying to commandeer VDI printing is how compatibility issues arise, and furthermore, it only ends up creating an extra component for admins to manage alongside the virtual solution.

Instead, PrinterLogic acts as a complement to native VDI printing. This enables it to integrate fully and seamlessly with your virtual environment while preserving the native VMware and Citrix printing functionality and enhancing the ease of management.

What does that look like in a real-world scenario? Well, let’s take Citrix printing as an example. If your organization prefers to use Citrix auto-created printers, that’s perfectly fine. Using PrinterLogic’s intuitive centralized management console, you can leverage our solution’s unique direct-IP printing capabilities to provision local printers to select endpoint devices. These devices will then print via the Citrix Universal Print Driver. Along with its streamlined administration, this method allows for compressed print jobs (easier on the WAN), driverless printing (for increased compatibility) and even support for home-based printers.

What many IT professionals are surprised to learn is that PrinterLogic achieves all this without the need for group policy or scripts. Yes, that’s right: PrinterLogic eliminates GPOs and scripts. The advanced deployment features of our next-generation serverless printing software fully leverage Active Directory criteria to deliver printers to specific users or entire groups—but, crucially, minus the usual administrative overhead. This eclipses the outdated, error-prone deployment mechanisms of legacy print-management solutions and helps solve the longstanding reliability and management challenges associated with VDI printing.

And PrinterLogic brings similar advantages to VMware printing as well.

Experience the ease of VDI printing with PrinterLogic
If you’d like to learn even more about how to prepare for VDI printing with PrinterLogic, have a look at this blog post on how our solution streamlines Citrix printing in the enterprise. Or check out this post on how to perfect your VDI printing with PrinterLogic. In those posts, you’ll begin to understand how customers like Pioneer Technology (read the case study here) have seen VDI printing and print-management issues all but vanish after implementing PrinterLogic’s Cloud Solution. For Pioneer, print-related support tickets dropped from an estimated 750 per month to around five.

Better yet, you can test PrinterLogic as a proof of concept in your current or prospective VDI environment. To do so, simply sign up today and you can download and test our serverless software solution completely free of charge for 30 days.

It’s no exaggeration to say that cloud computing is transforming the way organizations manage and adapt to business conditions and opportunities. Because it’s based on an elastic operational expense model (as opposed to an up-front capital investment approach), a cloud-based strategy helps organizations be more responsive and scalable when it comes to changing business demands.

But what about cloud-based printing? What options exist for organizations that are looking to shift their enterprise printing and print-management solutions into the cloud?

At PrinterLogic, our answer is PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud).

Before I get ahead of myself, though, it might be helpful to explain why traditional on-premises enterprise print management can be challenging and how these challenges affect our attitudes and thinking about cloud-based printing.

One of the most common print-infrastructure paradigms is the use of print servers. These servers are generally deployed in one of two configurations: consolidated (one centralized print server) or distributed (multiple localized print servers). With the consolidated model, all printing across the enterprise is riding on a single server, which creates a serious need for redundancy. With the distributed model, the print infrastructure is spread out across the network for added robustness.

This has led to a mindset among many IT professionals that print-management solutions need a lot of infrastructure in order to be suitable for the enterprise. Which is why the idea of eliminating print servers makes them incredibly excited, and deeply skeptical, at the same time.

It’s also led to a belief that enterprise printing, by its very nature, is complex, time-consuming and costly. The idea of cloud-based print management, if it’s done right, runs counter to that. Perhaps that’s why some organizations consider moving print servers to the cloud as part of their digital transformation. But there’s a far better solution that leaves legacy print servers and their associated disadvantages in the scrap pile.

PrinterLogic SaaS is a serverless, cloud-based printing platform for the enterprise
As we’ve shown with our on-premises solution (just look at the dozens of case studies), PrinterLogic’s next-generation software has the ability to eliminate print servers completely while providing organizations of all sizes with a centrally managed direct-IP printing platform. With less infrastructure comes more oversight, more control, more functionality, and more ease of use.

To those familiar with legacy print-management solutions, that might sound like a paradox. To us at PrinterLogic, it’s all in a day’s work.

PrinterLogic SaaS takes the proven success of our robust on-premises solution and brings it to a highly scalable, serverless printing platform for organizations that are migrating to the cloud. Like its on-prem counterpart, a single instance of PrinterLogic SaaS can eliminate every last one of your print servers—even in a large or highly distributed print environment.

PrinterLogic SaaS features PrinterLogic’s powerful and intuitive centralized management. This is a big advantage of cloud solutions in general, so it makes sense that we would include it in our cloud-based platform. Using the web-based administrative console, IT professionals can make comprehensive as well as granular changes to printers, drivers and profiles across the entire print environment from a single pane of glass.

With PrinterLogic SaaS, end users get access to the right printers, at the right time, based on where they sit and how they move about the company throughout the course of their day.

Other print-management solutions are content to offer basic cloud-based printing functionality—if they even offer it at all.

PrinterLogic SaaS goes beyond mere cloud-based printing
PrinterLogic SaaS also provides optional mobile and pull-printing capabilities. These features allow mobile, BYOD and guest users to print conveniently from any modern mobile device to any authorized network printer. With mobile printing, organizations can empower the ever-growing number of employees with tablets and smartphones without having to augment or replace their existing printer fleet, or adding to administrative overhead.

When using PrinterLogic SaaS’s optional pull and secure-release printing, our new Print Release App makes things even more user-friendly. From a single app on their smartphones, iOS and Android users can easily view their held print jobs and release them to an authorized destination printer of their choice. Any network printer can be configured as a pull or secure-release printer, which eliminates the need to upgrade printers or buy costly badge-release systems.

Furthermore, our direct-IP printing model minimizes WAN reliance that can impact your other cloud solutions. PrinterLogic SaaS sets up one-to-one connections between endpoints and printers and keeps all print jobs on the local network. Even if your internet connection is interrupted, printing continues as usual. Downtime from print-server failures and WAN interrupts that often plagues legacy print-management solutions simply isn’t a problem with PrinterLogic SaaS. Plus, keeping your print jobs local improves security because your confidential data stays where it belongs—behind your organization’s firewall.

PrinterLogic SaaS also integrates seamlessly with VMware and Citrix to enhance printing and print-management in those popular virtual environments.

Just as organizations like the Northwest Area Education Agency (check out the case study) have experienced, PrinterLogic SaaS’s unparalleled cloud-based printing and mobile-printing capabilities—along with its other native features, such as print auditing—provide a print environment that’s scalable, reliable, robust, incredibly manageable and cost-effective. Sign up today to test PrinterLogic SaaS in your own environment free of charge for 30 days.

There have been a number of recent studies on mobile adoption in the enterprise, and their findings tend to point to one thing above all else—namely, the ever-growing importance of mobile adoption in the enterprise.

By 2020, for example, Gartner is predicting that 75% of all smartphones used in the enterprise will be BYOD, marking a significant increase from today’s figure of 40%. And a Samsung-commissioned study by Oxford Economics found that close to 80% of the senior IT and business leaders who were surveyed said that their employees could not function effectively without a mobile phone. That rate and influence of mobile adoption naturally has serious implications for mobile printing and mobile print security.

What exactly is mobile printing?
Mobile printing is simple in theory but tends to be far more challenging when it comes to implementation. At its most basic, mobile printing can be summarized as the ability for any user with a mobile device, such as a Chromebook, smartphone or tablet, to print directly to a desired printer with as much (or even greater) ease as conventional printing from a desktop workstation.

Pretty straightforward, right?

Where it gets tricky is that this vision of mobile-printing functionality isn’t always fully supported by traditional enterprise print-management solutions. Finding a robust print-management solution that natively offers universal mobile printing capabilities can be just as difficult as finding a dedicated mobile-printing solution that will integrate seamlessly with your current print environment, including any mix of BYOD devices and legacy printers that you might have.

And that creates a serious problem in the enterprise. For companies that want to prepare their workplace for the future by providing their users with the most up-to-date tools to succeed, this obstacle to implementing organization-wide mobile printing can really restrict the scope and effectiveness of their mobile-adoption strategy. At best, it limits users’ options and flexibility. At worst, it keeps them tethered to an outdated IT model of traditional workstations.

The features and benefits of PrinterLogic mobile printing
PrinterLogic’s enterprise print-management software excels at transforming traditional print environments into next-generation print environments that no longer require nearly as much administrative overhead or infrastructure to enjoy cutting-edge functionality such as mobile printing. Our approach to mobile printing provides users with a simple, highly-available way to print their documents from their smartphones and tablets along with versatile print-release solutions that can actually increase mobile print security.

Some of the most compelling advantages of mobile printing with PrinterLogic include:

• It supports printing from any mobile device. On the two most ubiquitous mobile operating systems, Android and iOS, users can print natively to any designated PrinterLogic printer by simply tapping the “Share” icon. Users on less common and legacy operating systems can leverage proven email-to-print functionality and send print jobs to specific printers via a dedicated email address. This universality eliminates one of the biggest enterprise print-management challenges to deploying mobile printing across the organization.
• It works with any network printer. Is your printer fleet a hodgepodge of makes and models? Are you still using many legacy devices? Those are non-issues with PrinterLogic’s mobile printing, because our serverless software solution allows you to turn any networked printing device, including legacy models, into a printer that’s ready to receive mobile print jobs. That removes the need to purchase special printer models or replace large portions of your fleet.
• There’s no client-side software to install. What should be welcome news to admins and end users alike is that there’s absolutely no need to deploy or install any client-side software on the mobile device. This saves admins from having to invest extra hours in software provisioning, and it removes yet another step between end users and their ability to print effortlessly from their preferred mobile devices.
• End users enjoy flexible print-release solutions. One of the benefits of mobile printing with PrinterLogic is that end users can easily choose where their job should print, which is an essential capability when they’re moving between locations. Of course, admins have complete control over which printers are authorized to accept mobile print jobs, and they can configure these network printers accordingly through PrinterLogic’s powerful centralized management console.
• There’s an app for even more flexibility and mobile print security: PrinterLogic’s dedicated Print Release App gives iOS and Android users even more control over when and where their mobile print jobs are printed. After launching the app, they can quickly view their waiting secure, pull and mobile print jobs and then release them to a specific printer. Authenticating the app once gives users the convenient option to remain securely logged into the mobile printing system.

A proven path to effortless mobile printing
Instead of treating mobile printing like a challenge that has to be overcome, PrinterLogic turns it into a seamless extension of your enterprise print-management capabilities. Customers like Seventy Seven Energy (read the case study here) and the large US-based law firm Hunton & Williams (read the case study here) have discovered that they were able to use PrinterLogic to quickly and easily accommodate the rapidly growing internal demand for BYOD devices—all without deploying specialized infrastructure, sacrificing mobile print security or investing more time in administering the mobile-printing component of their print environment.

It’s just as easy to see if PrinterLogic’s mobile printing is the right solution for your organization. Take a few minutes to sign up for a free trial of our serverless print-management software and you’ll have the chance to test it in your own environment for thirty days.

Anonymous guest printing sounds somewhat vague, but it can be boiled down to a situation like this: A visitor from outside your workplace—it could be a consultant, a short-term freelancer or even an employee from another branch—needs to print a document to a local printer from their mobile device. How exactly do they do that?

In most cases, this seemingly simple process would actually involve multiple steps. If their mobile device has the right ports, the guest might have to transfer the document to a USB drive, then give the USB drive containing that file to an authorized user for printing. Or the guest might have to send the document via cloud services or email to an authorized user, who would then have to download the file and initiate the printing process. Either way, with conventional print-management solutions, it’s far more complicated than it ought to be—especially in large-scale enterprise environments.

The administrative challenge to anonymous guest printing
Even though it would be super-convenient to allow guests to print directly to printers whenever they need to, admins are often reluctant to implement anonymous guest printing for two interrelated reasons:

1. Technical barriers: In tightly controlled environments, allowing guests to access local printers typically means creating general or one-time accounts that they can use to join the local network. Managing those accounts and the rights associated with them increases administrative overhead. Furthermore, a potential lack of compatibility means there’s also no guarantee that their personal device will be able to access the printer once connected to the network.
2. Security risks: With increased access comes increased risk. Not all guests are benign actors; some could very likely have malicious intent. And with anonymous guest printing, the temptation exists for admins to lift—rather than impose—restrictions in order to avoid the inevitable support calls: “I’m logged into the network but I can’t print.” Security ends up taking a backseat to expedience.

The unfortunate result is that, despite its obvious benefits, guest printing gets sidelined. It’s too much work to administer and not sufficiently secure.

PrinterLogic makes anonymous guest printing intuitive, manageable and secure
PrinterLogic’s guest and BYOD printing capabilities overcome these longstanding hurdles associated with traditional print-management solutions. By leveraging proven email-to-print functionality, PrinterLogic enables guest users to print easily and reliably to specific local printers while giving admins the effortless control they need to limit guest access without having to spend more time managing that access.

For a guest to print to a desired local printer, all they have to do is email their files to a specific email address. That’s it. Those files then enter the queue like a standard print job. With this method, it also doesn’t matter whether the guest is on- or off-network.

On the administrative side of things, it’s just as easy. Using PrinterLogic’s centralized management console, admins can select which printers are authorized to receive anonymous guest printing jobs via their own dedicated email address. They can also set quotas and limit printing to black and white. Depending on the capabilities of the organization’s email platform, it’s also possible for admins to set additional parameters, such as which types of files the printer will accept. For example, email filters could be set up to allow DOCX and JPEG but reject RTF and TIFF attachments. This adds an element of secure printing to guest access.

PrinterLogic’s BYOD and guest printing functionality therefore delivers on both counts. While the organization retains complete control over who can print and to which printers (and without having to invest hours upon hours configuring their print-management solution accordingly), guests can print their documents quickly and intuitively.

PrinterLogic does even more to simplify printing and print management
While organizations like Hunton & Williams, LLP have used the power and convenience of PrinterLogic’s BYOD and guest printing to simplify printing and print management (read the case study here), there are many other ways that PrinterLogic can introduce next-gen capabilities to your print environment with a smaller footprint, minimal administrative overhead and seamless implementation. Just like our mobile-printing and guest-printing solutions, our secure-printing solution works with any network printer—even legacy models—and has the flexibility to suit any print environment without compromising on security or functionality.

Try PrinterLogic in your organization free for 30 days. You’ll be able to see firsthand how our serverless print-management solution can increase print-related efficiency, improve print availability, and provide visitors and roaming employees with anonymous guest printing that’s both reliable and incredibly easy to use.

You have been working on this project for several months. It is important and today you are presenting your data to your company’s stakeholders at the main office. Problem: You’re running late to your meeting. When you arrive at the main office across town you realize that you left the documents at your office. You have no time to return and get them. All the work and late nights preparing for this event may have just been for nothing. What to do?

Fortunately for you there is a solution. Pull Printing. For those not familiar with it, Pull Printing allows you to send your print job to a general print queue, then release it to any printer in the enterprise. Pull Printing is becoming more prevalent in corporate America as it increases productivity and allows users to:

• Print once, release many.
• Print once, release at any enterprise printer.
• Securely print sensitive documents for release by authorized users at any printer or Multi-Function Printer (Device), MFP or MFD.

However, Pull Printing is often difficult to implement effectively. Printer manufacturers often only develop their Pull Printing solution to work with their own brand of printers. This only adds to the complexity when implementing such solutions into mixed fleet environments where the customer has multiple brands of printers.

To make matters worse, traditional Pull Printing solutions are server based, forcing all print jobs to be directed to a centralized hold print queue on a server. This creates a single point of vulnerability. In the case of an intentional or accidental security breach, all print jobs of the enterprise are now considered at risk.

How Pull Printing works in PrinterLogic. The user sends a print job from her device to the pull printer. The job is held in a queue on her device until she authenticates her identity at the desired printer, then released and printed.

PrinterLogic, a company that helps IT professionals deliver a serverless print infrastructure, has taken the industry lead in developing the next generation of Pull Printing. PrinterLogic has developed technology:

1. To reduce risk by spreading the potential vulnerability vectors across the enterprise. Print jobs waiting to be released remain on the workstation of the person who printed the job, and only they (or another authorized person) can release the job at the printer. Jobs transition directly from that workstation to the printer and never go to a centralized print queue. This increases security by localizing any potential vulnerability to that one user. The remaining print jobs on other workstations are not at risk.
2. That is printer agnostic. This means the application works with any printer, regardless of manufacturer. There is no need to standardize on one manufacturer. This reduces cost and complexity. Those older printers can be enabled for Pull Printing without the need to replace them. Additionally, mixed fleet environments in large global or multinational companies can continue to allow local buyers to work with local printer companies.
3. For a Pull Printing solution that works in the cloud. PrinterLogic currently offers two types of solutions, OnPrem and Cloud. The cloud solution can be a hybrid model, hosted within the company’s cloud system. As of this writing, no other manufacturer offers any Pull Printing solution that is cloud based.
4. To allow Mobile Pull Printing. PrinterLogic has developed a Pull Printing mobile app that allows users to release jobs securely from their smartphones. For an OnPrem solution the smartphone needs to be on the same network as the PrinterInstaller server. However, the Cloud solution does not have this requirement and the smartphone can be on any network. This is ideal for an office with Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies. The mobile solutions works with all printers and MFDs. Additionally, no application needs to be loaded on the printer, thereby decreasing complexity and increasing the speed at which a user can release print jobs.

PrinterLogic’s pull-printing solution is designed to reduce your print environment security risk and be minimally disruptive to your organization’s network. For example, there’s no need to upgrade or replace your printers to fit PrinterLogic’s solution or to increase user adoption.

Reach out to a PrinterLogic rep at any time to set up a meeting. Or check out the resources on our website.