Another year, another software end-of-life (EoL) deadline. It seems like only yesterday that EoL was announced for Windows Server 2003, later followed by EoL for Windows 7. This time the EoL affects Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2, which are scheduled to stop receiving long-term support as of January 14, 2020.

After the EoL date, any server running 2008 or 2008 R2 will no longer receive updates of any kind. Crucially, that lack of updates includes security patches. That means any vulnerabilities in the operating system won’t be fixed and will remain exploitable.

In all fairness, this shouldn’t come as too big of a surprise. Mainstream support for 2008 R2 already ended back on January 13, 2015, and many organizations, including yours, are likely already making preparations to retire and transition from your 2008 servers.

 But before you start implementing the next steps, take a moment to consider how software EoL can actually become a fresh start for your print environment.

The start of something new

Migrating servers is a time-consuming business. If things don’t go smoothly (and when do they ever go smoothly?), the process can cause serious disruptions to the wider IT environment.

Furthermore, migration doesn’t always lead to massive net benefits. Afterwards, you’re still stuck with an expensive, cumbersome server-based infrastructure. That infrastructure has to be constantly monitored and maintained—and eventually migrated again.

PrinterLogic’s unique serverless print infrastructure provides an opportunity to leave server-based printing behind for good. Rather than migrate your print server, you can simply move to PrinterLogic and enjoy centrally managed direct-IP printing. Our next-gen architecture is more resilient, more streamlined and more scalable than legacy print-management solutions. At the same time, it’s far easier to manage and is flexible enough to suit any use case.

Less of what you don’t want, more of what you do

PrinterLogic does more than eliminate your print servers. It also brings major time- and cost-saving benefits above and beyond infrastructure reduction. Here are just a few:

• Centralized management: Even if your print environment is geographically distributed, you can easily manage every printer in your fleet from a single pane of glass. The same goes for drivers, too, thanks to PrinterLogic’s common driver repository.
• Scripting and GPO elimination: You can ditch GPOs and scripts at the same time as your print servers. That’s because PrinterLogic integrates seamlessly with Active Directory to allow precise, highly configurable deployments that don’t rely on Group Policy.
• Advanced features: With legacy print-management solutions such as print servers, implementing advanced features usually calls for third-party solutions. PrinterLogic offers sought-after enterprise functionality like user-friendly mobile/BYOD printing and powerful print auditing as an extension of its core platform.
• Tighter security: PrinterLogic’s consolidated admin console gives IT professionals at-a-glance oversight of the print environment, making it far easier to monitor. Its direct-IP architecture also eliminates single attack vectors because client–printer connections are decentralized. And features like secure printing reduce the risk in everyday printing.
• SaaS options: On-prem solutions are great, but many organizations are looking to the future and moving to the cloud. PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud) gives you that option with none of the usual compromises of cloud-printing solutions.

Eliminate the negative, implement the positive

Before you decide to follow through with migrating from Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2 to a newer version, put PrinterLogic to the test in your own environment. All you have to do is take a few seconds and sign up today for a demo. That’ll give you access to PrinterLogic and all of its features totally free of charge for 30 days.

That experience might not only save you from the chore of server migration. It could also mark a bright new beginning for your print environment.

Managing the print configurations and capabilities of endpoints can be time-consuming work. When you’re also dealing with endpoints in distant branch or remote offices, the amount of time you need to sink into print management can really skyrocket.

In today’s enterprise, that’s as true as it ever was. Given all the casual threats and malicious actors that exploit weaknesses at the level of desktops, BYOD smartphones and, yes, even printers, endpoint management has also taken on a major security-related component in recent years. If you’re not taking extra time to lock down your endpoints, you’re leaving the door wide open to rogue activity.

Those two aspects—endpoint printing and endpoint security—overlap more than you might think. Features like centralized print management and pull printing can not only make branch-office IT administration more efficient. They can also harden the IT environment.

And with the right print-management solution, the potential exists for even more benefits: print-infrastructure reduction, increased ease of use and uninterrupted print availability. To name only a few.

Superior endpoint management
For a long time, most admins thought centralized print management and direct-IP printing were mutually exclusive. Then they discovered PrinterLogic.

Our serverless print infrastructure creates straightforward, one-to-one connections between endpoint devices like desktops and printers. Using legacy print-management solutions, those direct-IP connections usually have to be manually configured one at a time. Not with PrinterLogic. Instead admins can easily deploy direct-IP printers to users en masse—and without the need for GPOs and scripts. They can then manage the entire environment from a single pane of glass.

That clearly makes endpoint management across the enterprise a lot easier. It also improves security because it eliminates print servers as a single attack vector and a single point of failure. Furthermore, it allows for unparalleled oversight. With one convenient window onto the entire print environment, admins can keep better tabs on print activity.

Superior endpoint security
One ongoing—and often overlooked—security vulnerability is the printer itself. When users send important documents to the wrong printer or forget to pick up sensitive print jobs, that information risks being exposed. It doesn’t take a stone-cold cybercriminal to quietly walk away with the confidential report that someone left sitting in the output tray.

That’s why a lot of organizations have started to make use of pull printing. The main challenge here, though, is that pull printing is a bolt-on feature for many traditional print-management solutions. That can limit its scope of deployment and its compatibility with other printing solutions in the environment.

Pull printing from PrinterLogic stands out from the pack because it functions as an extension of our core print-management solution. Pretty much any network printer can be augmented with secure pull-printing functionality through our handy Print Release App for iOS and Android smartphones or our versatile new Control Panel Platform.

And for organizations that have existing badge systems or need government-grade authorization, PrinterLogic can integrate seamlessly with their CAC/PIV and ID-card authentication mechanisms. As customers like Georgia’s Fulton County School System discovered, implementing badge- and PIN-release pull printing with PrinterLogic is as close to “set it and forget it” as you can get (read the case study here).

Superior benefits
The thing is, the advantages of PrinterLogic don’t end with effortless endpoint management and enhanced security. The same direct-IP platform that allows for centralized print management and easy-to-implement pull printing also reduces print infrastructure through print-server elimination.

Another massive benefit is that PrinterLogic minimizes print-related WAN traffic. With print jobs now traveling directly between endpoints, data-heavy print jobs are no longer crossing the WAN. That reduces network congestion and can increase the speed of printing as well as the performance of VDI clients.

New Pig Corporation is just one of the many enterprise customers to see how implementing PrinterLogic for improved endpoint management resulted in incidental improvements across the print environment (read the case study here). They’d wrestled with the drawbacks of legacy print-management solutions for years before realizing that the status quo was holding them back.

Take a second or two and sign up today for a free demo of PrinterLogic. You’ll get the opportunity to test drive our solution for 30 days and experience the unprecedented ease of centralized print management firsthand. Chances are that you’ll never look at endpoint management the same way again.

I don’t want to sound alarmist, but there’s a good chance your current corporate printing solution is working against you.

If your company is using print servers, your entire print infrastructure is vulnerable to single points of failure. For proof, you don’t need to look much further than the last time the print spooler crashed and users temporarily lost the ability to print.

It’s also no secret that print servers cause minor but irritating printing problems due to their poor driver management and unreliable deployments.

And if your company is using conventional direct IP provisioning, you’re probably pleased with the stability of your printing. But you’re also likely spending way too much time manually configuring every single printer connection whenever there’s a change.

All of these drawbacks end up hurting productivity. When a user doesn’t have instant access to the right printer, that amounts to lost time. When an admin has to wrestle with IT printing solutions instead of focusing on more important issues, that’s wasted resources. When users are ticked off at IT because they can’t print, that’s not great for morale.

Many companies end up living with this state of affairs because they assume enterprise printing is doomed to be imperfect. Standard corporate printing solutions have been a pain in the neck for so long that frustration and hassle just seem to go with the territory.

Fortunately, more and more organizations are becoming increasingly aware of next-generation alternatives.

An enterprise print-management solution that works with you
At PrinterLogic, since day one we’ve been focused on print management that ditches all the caveats and limitations of legacy IT printing solutions. That’s how our serverless print infrastructure came to be based on centrally managed direct-IP printing.

Centrally managed direct-IP printing takes the simple resiliency of one-to-one client–printer connections and combines it with powerful administrative control and oversight from a single pane of glass.

Because our solution doesn’t require print servers to negotiate printing, it’s platform agnostic and integrates seamlessly with any environment—even typically challenging Citrix and VMware virtual environments. And because it can be administered from one console, it makes remote management super easy in highly distributed environments.

Even better, it allows printers to be deployed to individual users or entire groups based on detailed criteria, yet it does away with another perennial print server downside: Group Policy Objects. So you can still configure precise deployments using Active Directory. You’re just no longer at the mercy of GPOs and scripts.

When your head is in the cloud
A lot of companies are migrating their infrastructure to the cloud. Naturally, they want to move their corporate printing solutions there as well. But as many discover, printing is a little trickier than spinning up a virtual print server. Why? Because now you’ve got a WAN connection between your client and that cloud server. If that WAN connection is interrupted, so is printing.

PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud), by contrast, retains all the benefits our centrally managed direct-IP printing. If there’s a break in the WAN connection for any reason, current users can still print as usual.

That has beneficial side effects. Because print jobs remain on the local network, printing is speedier with PrinterLogic SaaS than with ordinary cloud-based IT printing solutions. Print-related network traffic doesn’t congest the WAN connection and contribute to bottlenecks that can impact the performance of other cloud software. And printer management is as effortless as ever, because the convenient admin console doesn’t sacrifice functionality or oversight.

Fewer moving parts, more productivity
For all the unique advantages and added benefits of centrally managed direct-IP printing, PrinterLogic’s success is rooted in its ability to eliminate print servers. Removing print servers from the print environment brings increased print availability, more scalability and greater ease of management. By the same token, it means reduced downtime, fewer help-desk calls and less hardware and software to monitor, manage and migrate.

In short, that translates to more productivity for end users and admins alike. That’s an outcome borne out by real-world results. Tazergy, a Georgia-based MSP specializing in senior housing, found that PrinterLogic SaaS helped to shrink print-related help-desk tickets to nearly zero (read the case study here). And they certainly aren’t they the only PrinterLogic customer with that experience.

If you think the print environment might be holding back productivity in your company, there’s only one way to be sure. All it takes is a few seconds to sign up for a demo of PrinterLogic. That will get you full-featured access to our solution—and the experience of an efficient, productive print environment—completely free of charge for 30 days.

In enterprise IT administration, one convention for enforcing user settings and computer configurations is Group Policy Objects (GPOs).

This system works with the criteria in Active Directory (AD) to impose certain rules and create a very controlled computing environment for the individual end user. GPOs, for example, are used to limit access to network shares. Or to ensure that the workstations in a particular department can only be accessed by authorized individuals.

The utility of GPOs—at least in theory—is pretty obvious. They’re a way for admins to manage the entire environment centrally.

But in practice, GPOs aren’t even close to perfect. They can actually be one of the biggest headaches in centralized print management. That’s led many admins to try and eliminate GPOs where they can.

Why eliminate GPOs from your print environment?
A fundamental problem with GPOs is that they’re underpinned by a hierarchical structure. This hierarchy starts at a granular level (the computer) and ends by casting the widest net (large groups called Organizational Units, or OUs). Generally, this makes a lot of sense. You need to have a prioritization scheme behind how the policies will be enforced.

Unfortunately, when there are conflicting configurations at different tiers, GPOs can be more of a hindrance than a help. In print-management scenarios, GPO quirks can result in incorrect or even failed printer deployments. Security filtering is harder, too, because sometimes GPOs lack the necessary scope. Other times, exceptions have to be created to get the desired end result.

And when there are a bunch of GPOs in effect, it can create a complex tangle that’s incredibly hard to sift through and troubleshoot if something goes wrong.

Even at the best of times, GPOs are never what you’d describe as ideal. It’s hard to set default printing options in a way that’s simple, reliable and universally enforceable. GPOs also take time to process during logons, which can slow logon times—sometimes by as much as five minutes or more.

However, when you’re talking about enterprise printing and centralized print management, eliminating GPOs can be close to impossible. Most traditional print-management solutions rely on GPOs to deploy printers and enforce printing policies.

How to eliminate GPOs and still have centralized print management
PrinterLogic’s unique approach to enterprise printing does two important things. It eliminates print servers to achieve unprecedented print-infrastructure reduction. And it eliminates GPOs and scripts to provide full-featured centralized print management with none of the usual frustrations and compromises.

Our next-generation serverless print infrastructure is what makes that possible. By leveraging direct IP for client–printer connections, print servers are no longer necessary. That enables organizations to carry out print-infrastructure reduction and completely remove single points of failure while also ensuring more stable, more straightforward printer connections.

At the same time, and in contrast to conventional direct IP printing, PrinterLogic allows admins to oversee and control the entire print environment from a single pane of glass. Using this one console, admins can set up advanced printer deployments based on a whole host of Active Directory (AD) criteria. That’s because PrinterLogic integrates seamlessly with AD to provision printers to large groups or even individual users in a targeted way.

In the end, PrinterLogic gives admins all the power and functionality of enterprise-grade print-management tools but neatly eliminates GPOs (and scripts too) from the list of requirements.

The benefits of GPO elimination
By taking GPOs out of print management entirely, organizations like the United States Special Operations Command have found that the situation improves for admins and end users alike (read the case study here). Admins and their support teams are able to deploy printers using same AD criteria—only now more efficiently and more reliably. And end users actually get the printers they’re supposed to, saving them the hassle of having to call the help desk.

Other organizations, such as Navicent Health (read the case study here), have used PrinterLogic’s ability to eliminate GPOs as a way to empower their support technicians. They can also now enjoy faster logons and automatic enforcement of cost-saving printer policies, including defaulting back to monochrome after each print job.

Now that you’ve seen the why and how of GPO elimination, it’s time to experience the wow. With PrinterLogic, any organization can simultaneously eliminate GPOs and print servers to realize a print-infrastructure reduction along with effortless centralized print management. Sign up for a free demo and test drive PrinterLogic in your own print environment for 30 days.

The importance of high availability in a print environment shouldn’t be news to anyone. End users need to print when they need to print. End of story. Otherwise, it’s just lost productivity.

And it isn’t just lost productivity for end users. When those users make a help-desk call or file a support ticket because their print job has vanished, there’s someone on the other end who has to address that issue. Now it’s lost productivity for two people, because IT folks should really be dealing with bigger stuff than printer issues.

All the same, creating a highly available print environment isn’t exactly easy when you’re using legacy IT printing solutions like print servers. To achieve high availability, most organizations end up adding infrastructure in the form of more print servers.

Some folks call this redundancy, but it’s more like mission creep. What it really amounts to is introducing backup single points of failure to cover the primary single points of failure. It’s also not cost-effective. It’s just more hardware and software to manage and maintain.

What high availability should (and can) look like
Imagine this: An end user is moved to a new department. She logs in for the first time on a different workstation, yet she automatically has access to all the nearby printers. This is all invisible to her, of course. All she knows is that she just clicked “Print” and successfully printed out a document on a printer down the hall—and without having to interact at all with the help desk.

Later in the day, there’s some trouble with the WAN connection. Looks like the ISP is having some temporary service issues. Yet, despite not being able to browse the Internet or access email, every user in the building is able to print as if nothing had changed. It’s all business as usual.

That’s what a highly available print environment looks like. Productivity is uninterrupted, printing is effortless and there’s close to zero downtime. But with traditional IT printing solutions like print servers or direct IP, both of those scenarios are hard to come by.

Create a highly available print environment with PrinterLogic
PrinterLogic makes those high-availability scenarios a matter of course. Our next-generation serverless print infrastructure actually eliminates print servers completely to achieve greater redundancy and resiliency in the print environment. That means your organization can bring about a print-infrastructure reduction at the same time as it increases print availability.

What makes this possible is PrinterLogic’s unique direct-IP printing platform. To deliver the optimal experience for end users and admins alike, we took the most straightforward, proven form of reliable printing and combined it with enterprise-wide administration from a single pane of glass. PrinterLogic unites direct-IP printing and centralized management to provide:

• Superior print management: Admins can monitor and manage the entire print environment—even in distributed organizations—from one central console. And the common driver repository makes it easy to stay on top of print drivers.
• Reliable location-based printing: Supplying mobile users with the right printers can be like trying to hit a moving target. PrinterLogic makes location-based printing easy and dependable.
• No GPOs, no scripts: Want to configure advanced deployments using specific variables? No problem. PrinterLogic integrates with Active Directory so printers can be deployed to users based on criteria like OU, container and group. All without group policy and custom scripts.
• Reduced infrastructure: With PrinterLogic, less is more. Our solution introduces incredible new features and stability to the print environment while minimizing infrastructure requirements.
• Self-service printer installation: Empower your end users to safely install their own printers by simply visiting web-based floorplan maps. Printers and associated drivers are installed with a single click.
• Optimized WAN usage: Because PrinterLogic creates direct client-to-printer connections, print traffic stays on the local network. Data-heavy print jobs no longer battle with vital network traffic for WAN bandwidth.

Tested in the most demanding print environments
PrinterLogic’s robustness and resilience aren’t just theoretical. Our solutions have been implemented in some of the most fast-paced and demanding print environments to provide availability that just wasn’t possible with legacy IT printing solutions.

A perfect example is the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). This is an enterprise-scale organization that got tired of conventional IT printing solutions not being up to snuff. Print servers just couldn’t deliver the uptime, flexibility, scalability and ease of management that USSOCOM achieved with PrinterLogic right from the start (read the case study here).

If you’d like to see firsthand how the USSOCOM and hundreds of other organizations created highly available print environments while also achieving significant print-infrastructure reduction, sign up today for a free demo of PrinterLogic. You can put it to the test for 30 days and see what high print availability and reduced print infrastructure can look like in your own organization.

Printing in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments can offset some of the inherent advantages of virtual solutions. As a lot of IT pros will confirm, it’s not always easy to get the right printers to the right users at the right time. That can put a damper on the consistency and ease of management many organizations hope to gain from VDI environments.

One of the most common issues with virtual desktop printing is ensuring that users who travel between locations are presented with nearby printers. That was a challenge The Conversant Group faced with several bi-coastal law firms that relied on Citrix printing (read the case study here), and their experience isn’t unique.

Another common issue is driver management. Although popular enterprise VDI solutions like VMware and Citrix allow for convenient centralized management of the desktop experience, it can be tough maintaining uniform and up-to-date versions of printer drivers—especially when you’re using multiple print servers.

The secret to seamless, effortless virtual desktop printing
It’s a lesson we learned in grade school: You’ll get more done by working with someone than working against them. That’s why the best printing solutions for Citrix and VMware don’t try to assume control of printing. That’s just a recipe for incompatibility issues. Instead, the best printing solutions leverage native VDI print capabilities and, well, make them better.

And that’s exactly what PrinterLogic does. Our serverless print infrastructure works alongside—not against—virtual environments to enhance their print functionality through centralized management and rock-solid direct-IP printing. That enables PrinterLogic to integrate seamlessly with any virtual solution and provide more reliable, more robust virtual desktop printing to end users.

What’s key is that PrinterLogic is able to accomplish all this without the need for print servers. That means you can eliminate your entire print-server infrastructure along with all its complexity and costs.

In the end, you get rid of single points of failure and maintenance hassle while gaining superior print management and more stability.

The benefits of virtual printing with PrinterLogic
Eliminating print servers and seamless integration are huge advantages to using PrinterLogic for virtual desktop printing. But they’re not the only ones.

Because PrinterLogic enhances VMware printing as well as Citrix printing, you can opt for several printer-provisioning methods—including driverless printing for greater ease of management.

You can also easily set up features like location-based printing. In many virtual environments, location-based printing can be hard to configure, but PrinterLogic’s advanced deployments allow users to get printers based on specific criteria like IP addresses. And what’s even better is that admins don’t have to touch a single script or GPO to deploy printers with pinpoint accuracy.

Another feature that complements the flexibility and mobility of VDI environments is PrinterLogic’s self-service installation portal. This is ideal for those users who frequently travel to new and different sites. Rather than relying exclusively on location-based printer deployments, they can simply visit a web-based portal, view a floor plan map and then click on the printer they want. The nearby printer—along with any related drivers—is installed instantly.

With PrinterLogic, the help-desk calls that always seem to accompany virtual desktop printing become a thing of the past. Just like print servers.

An endorsed virtual printing solution for every use case
No matter which virtual solution you use, PrinterLogic has seen proven results.

There’s Strata IT, for instance, an MSP that uses our solution in a Windows VDI environment (read the case study here). There’s Physician Partners of America (PPOA), a healthcare provider that uses PrinterLogic in a Parallels RAS environment (read the case study here). And Pioneer Technology uses PrinterLogic for Citrix printing (read the case study here).

Furthermore, our solutions come with official endorsements from the biggest names in virtualization. PrinterLogic Web Stack is verified as Citrix Ready®, and PrinterLogic SaaS recently earned VMware Partner Ready™ status.

Find out why PrinterLogic is consistently praised by our customers as the best printing solution they’ve found for virtual desktop printing and print-infrastructure reduction. Take a few seconds to sign up today and test PrinterLogic completely free of charge in your own environment for 30 days.