At this point, very few people are left questioning the importance of mobile devices in the enterprise. When 500 senior IT executives, CEOs and other senior managers were polled as part of a 2018 Oxford Economics survey, the vast majority (75% or more) said that mobile devices were vital to their workers’ effectiveness and their companies’ workflows.

With the enterprise adoption of mobile devices comes the need for mobile printing. And not just any mobile printing—enterprise-grade mobile printing. That involves more than just basic printing from smartphones and tablets. It also includes capabilities like BYOD/guest printing and secure release.

Legacy print management solutions just aren’t equipped to meet those needs. In the past, that’s forced organizations to come up with workarounds or go out in search of expensive dedicated mobile printing solutions. Both of those options tend to come with complexity and limitations.

PrinterLogic’s mobile printing is superior because it’s made for enterprise use. By leveraging the strengths of our serverless printing infrastructure, it’s easy to administer, flexible to implement and transparent to end users.

PrinterLogic Supports Native Printing from Android and iOS Devices

One of the problems with ordinary approaches to mobile printing is that they’re often aligned with a particular OS. Supporting both Android and iOS printing can feel like maintaining two separate microenvironments. That’s restrictive to enterprises that make use of both ecosystems.

Mobile printing with PrinterLogic lets your Android as well as your iOS users print natively from their devices. All they have to do is tap the “Share” button and send the document on their screen to their desired printer. There’s zero client-side software for them to install in order to print. In short, that means they can always print when they need to.

Plus, using PrinterLogic’s intuitive admin console, it’s quick and straightforward for admins to enable specific printers to receive print jobs from mobile devices. That even goes for legacy devices.

Thanks to our Print Release App, Android and iOS users also have access to secure printing. Once they’ve initiated a job from their mobile device, they can simply launch the Print Release App, select one or more jobs and then send them to a specific printer. 

Along with being more secure than standard mobile printing, the app is super handy if users change their mind—or their location—after initiating the print job.

Provide Print Capabilities to BYOD Users and Guests

Native printing support for company-issued devices is one thing. Another perpetual challenge in enterprise mobile printing is supporting BYOD users and guests.

We’ve got this area covered too. Using email-to-print functionality, printing is as easy as sending an email—regardless of whether the user is on- or off-network. BYOD users and guests can simply attach their files to an email and send it to the printer’s dedicated address.

PrinterLogic’s BYOD and guest printing isn’t just easy on end users. It’s also easy on admins. When all end users need to print is an email address, that saves them from having to call the helpdesk and ask for support.

Empower Mobile Users with Self-Service Printer Installation

Smartphones and tablets aren’t the only mobile devices in the enterprise. Laptops are still an important part of the mobile equation.

With PrinterLogic’s self-service printer installation portal, end users can easily locate and install the nearest printer. Even if they’re new to the building or the company, they can use the optional floorplan maps to quickly identify which printer is most convenient. Clicking on the printer icon will safely install the printer and any related drivers.

A feature like this empowers users to access printers on their own without needing assistance from IT. That’s bound to make admins and end users happy. In cutting out the waiting and uncertainty when end users need to print to a new printer, PrinterLogic’s self-service portal gets them up and running quickly and smoothly.

Tazergy is just one of many organizations to implement PrinterLogic’s user- and admin-friendly mobile printing. This IT-services provider for the senior housing industry called it the “icing on the cake” to their successful rollout of our next-gen print management solution. (Read the case study here.)

And it gets even better. Mobile printing is included at no extra cost with our core cloud solution, PrinterLogic SaaS.

Improving the ease and reliability of enterprise mobile printing in your organization doesn’t have to wait. All you have to do is start your PrinterLogic trial today. That will give you the opportunity to test drive mobile printing—along with all of the other incredible features of our solution—free of charge for 30 days.

At the end of the day, printing issues equal printing costs. Every time IT is called to reboot a crashed print server or install a new printer, it takes their attention off bigger things. That amounts to lost productivity for them as well as the end users who aren’t able to print.

That lost productivity shouldn’t be underestimated. Research from IDC has indicated that IT staff spend 15% of their time dealing with print-related issues. And helpdesk calls? Nearly a quarter of them (23%) involve problems with printing. [link] Think about how much time and money could be saved if those percentages dropped by half. Or even more.

Yet it’s easy for companies to overlook these soft costs of enterprise print management. Budgets usually take things like hardware purchasing, maintenance and consumables into account. But what’s often missing is the amount your company is wasting on every single support call to remedy common printing issues.

Fortunately, there’s no rule that says you have to keep pouring the same resources into printing. Using the right print management solution, you can print for less. To see how, here’s a brief look at three of the most common printing issues and ways to avoid them.

1. Outdated Print Drivers and Software

Print servers have never really been an ideal print management solution. They’re single points of failure and hard to configure. Now that we’re well into the mobile era, they’re really starting to show their age. Compatibility issues and limited support for mobile devices are a constant problem.

Not that traditional desktops were much easier. Just look at driver management. It can be difficult to roll out—and undo—driver updates. It’s also tough to stay on top of which drivers need to remain at a certain version for compatibility reasons.

The solution: PrinterLogic’s serverless printing software enables admins to centrally manage printer objects as well as profile settings from a single pane of glass—even if your organization is highly distributed. The consolidated repository also simplifies driver management. You can easily configure automatic driver installations, updates and rollbacks.

 2. Overrun IT Helpdesk

As I wrote above, printing problems end up squandering time and resources. And while it’s easy to think of a swamped helpdesk as a problem in its own right, it’s actually a sign of a fundamental flaw with conventional enterprise print management.

Let’s start with the end user who can’t print. They tried to install their own printer, but GPO weirdness prevented it from getting deployed properly. The user then has to take time to call the helpdesk, where a ticket is created. The admin responsible has a hundred other fires to put out, but they have to get printing back online for this end user, who’s growing angrier by the second.

This is a very common printing issue, and it leads to an antagonistic relationship between end users and IT. It’s a never-ending cycle that companies need to break. But they can’t do that with standard print management solutions.

The solution: The answer isn’t to take functionality away from your end users. Empower them instead. PrinterLogic offers a native self-service printer installation portal that enables end users to easily find and install their own printers. They simply visit the web-based portal in their browser, choose their printer from a floor plan map, and install it with a single click. No helpdesk call needed.

Unlike print server solutions, PrinterLogic doesn’t rely on GPOs or scripts, either. That means you can configure advanced automatic deployments that you and your end users can count on.

3. Overspending on Printing

No matter how you’ve got your print servers set up, they suffer from serious shortcomings. If they’re consolidated, remote sites constantly depend on a fast, stable WAN connection for their printing. If they’re distributed, they add more infrastructure and are harder to manage. All of those things lead to more costs.

On top of that, there’s a lack of control and oversight. End users change their printer settings for one job and end up printing everything in color after that. Or they send the job to the wrong printer without realizing, so they print it again and again.

The solution: Because PrinterLogic’s software creates a serverless printing infrastructure, you can eliminate print servers completely—along with all their hassle and costs. Features like secure release printing help to keep sensitive jobs safe while also reducing the likelihood of stray print jobs. And admins can enforce advanced default settings, so printer profiles always revert back to black and white.

And how do you know that a user is hung up on color printing? Built-in advanced reporting from PrinterLogic lets you track print jobs and trends down to the user level. You can easily spot anomalies and tie printer usage to real-world costs.

Start Reclaiming Your Time and Money

By solving the root causes of common printing issues, PrinterLogic allows you to print for less. It makes printing more reliable and print management more efficient than you could ever hope to achieve using print server solutions. 

That’s exactly what leading law firm Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLC experienced (read the case study here). In addition to reducing the firm’s print infrastructure, our serverless printing software simplified every aspect of their print environment. Escalated print-related support tickets dropped to zero. They saved 10+ hours per week on frontend print management. 

Ready to see the same in your organization? Start your trial today and test PrinterLogic completely free of charge for 30 days.

When we talk about PrinterLogic and the advantages of serverless printing, most organizations are eager to hear more. Centralized printer management? Reduced print-related WAN traffic? Self-service printer installation? Seamless VDI printing? Yes, please!

In organizations that already have large numbers of print servers deployed, sometimes that excitement is accompanied by skepticism. Can a single instance of PrinterLogic really replace dozens of print servers? And are the benefits of serverless printing the same for eliminating five print servers as for eliminating fifty? (Hint: Yes.)

Whereas legacy print-management solutions—for example, print servers and conventional direct IP—see diminishing returns in large organizations, PrinterLogic is different. Its benefits scale to match the size and complexity of your enterprise.

Why Removing Print Servers Helps Large Companies

Migrating from multiple print servers to a serverless printing infrastructure like PrinterLogic’s helps to achieve unprecedented simplicity. With print servers deployed, you wind up with lots of fragmentation in your print environment. Each print server creates a kind of micro-environment that needs to be managed independently.

It’s the exact opposite with PrinterLogic. Our solution’s centralized printer management lets you administer your entire print environment from a single pane of glass. That web-based console consolidates the print environment into one unified whole.

Clearly, organizations that have a bunch of print micro-environments also have the most to gain. And that also applies to organizations with tons of complex deployment schemes too. Because PrinterLogic eliminates the need for GPOs and scripts, you can configure advanced deployments without the shortcomings of Group Policy and custom scripting.

So, along with reducing massive amounts of physical infrastructure, PrinterLogic streamlines print management. The more reduction and streamlining you have to do, the more impact PrinterLogic will have. On that note, let’s look at some potential cost savings.

Cost Savings of Serverless Printing

Each print server at each site requires hardware procurement and licensing, cooling, power, physical security, management, maintenance, upgrades, virus scans and so on. All of those “hidden” costs add up. Most estimates peg the average total cost of a print server at $2,000 to $5,000 per year.

In other words, you’re saving that amount with each print server you eliminate. And by replacing them with a single print management solution like PrinterLogic, you can get a better fix on your overall print budget.

That’s not the only thing. Using PrinterLogic’s advanced print reporting, you can audit your print environment down to the user level. This makes it easy to keep tabs on individual printers and see which ones are in high demand or can be retired.

You can even track printing usage throughout entire organization and see where color printing is higher than it needs to be. AAA Carolinas used that very feature to reclaim what they described as “a pretty good stack of dollars” (read the case study here).

3 Easy Steps to Create a Serverless Print Environment

Based on their experience with ordinary print management solutions, many IT experts assume that abandoning print servers poses a major hurdle. But migrating to a serverless printing environment is easier than you might think. With PrinterLogic, it’s just three steps:

1. Open the PrinterLogic Admin Console
2. Import your existing printers
3. Deploy the PrinterLogic client using your preferred method

Once PrinterLogic is implemented, you can manage printers and drivers across your organization—regardless of whether you use domains or not. Any changes you make to a printer object are automatically applied to that printer on all your workstations. No wonder why so many customers tell us that PrinterLogic’s centralized printer management is transformative.

Or, in the words of Bank Plus, “invaluable.” Here’s a community bank that had 65 different locations across Mississippi and a print server at every one of them. Adding new print servers was meant to ease the burden but only ended up making things worse. PrinterLogic’s serverless printing infrastructure changed all that, saving them time, headache and money. Read the case study here. Serverless printing can do the same for you. Sign up for a trial today and test PrinterLogic free of charge for 30 days. Cloud or on-prem, the choice is yours. You’ll soon see why the question isn’t about whether large organizations can eliminate print servers. It’s about how they could have waited so long to do it.