Increased security comes with added costs, right?

Not necessarily. By implementing pull printing through PrinterLogic, you can actually end up saving money while boosting the security of your print environment.

Part of that comes down to pull printing itself. But the real cost savings start to add up when it’s combined with our serverless printing infrastructure. Unlike legacy printing solutions, PrinterLogic eliminates print servers and brings greater ease of use.

Pull Printing Reduces Print Waste

The average employee prints 34 pages per day. Yet estimates predict that five of those pages (14%) will never get picked up from the printer—whether it’s due to forgetfulness, distraction or the end user simply changing their mind after printing.

Over the long term, those printing habits take their toll. A study by the Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance found that the average office worker uses nearly 10,000 sheets, or about two cases, of printer paper each year. Depending on your printing solution, that amounts to about 1,400 wasted pages.

If you calculate an average price of $40 per case, you’re now looking at $11 of annual paper waste per employee. That might not sound like much. But when you factor in print consumables and services like ink, toner, storage, disposal and recycling, the costs see a hefty jump.

Now multiply that by every employee in the company. In an enterprise organization, that could easily be on the scale of $100,000 in printing waste alone each year.

Some organizations turn to managed print services to get to grips with this unnecessary spending. But pull printing with PrinterLogic can be a more effective tool. So, besides eliminating print servers, how exactly does PrinterLogic tackle those ongoing costs?

Pull printing splits the printing process into two steps. In the first step, nothing changes. The end user clicks “Print” as usual. But the print job is temporarily held until the user releases that print job to a specific printer.

With PrinterLogic, they can perform that release through our control panel application, our Print Release App or even a tablet set up near the printer in kiosk mode. It’s kind of like them saying, “Okay, I definitely want that, and I want to pick it up here.”

By making routine printing more intentional, pull printing cuts down on abandoned print jobs. Along with all their attendant costs.

Sensitive Information Stays Confidential

When employees print a document and then fail to retrieve it from the printer, it’s not just wasting money. It also runs the risk of exposing confidential information.

Exposure of sensitive information can have serious financial consequences. A 2019 study on print security found that individual data breaches were reported to have cost organizations $400,000 per incident on average.

Pull printing adds security through the exact same process as it uses to reduce waste. That deliberate second step helps to ensure that end users are physically present at a printer and prepared to pick up their completed jobs. There’s less chance of those confidential documents left sitting unattended in the output tray.

For an extra layer of security, the release step can involve authentication. That’s called secure release printing, which PrinterLogic also supports through multiple authentication methods.

PrinterLogic Adds Value While Cutting Costs

PrinterLogic’s ability to eliminate print servers while providing added functionality has made it a printing solution of choice among providers of managed print services.

Our cloud solution, PrinterLogic SaaS, has enabled MSPs like Ireland’s Independent Photocopier Services (IPS) to provide their customers with pull printing and other cost-saving features. Read the case study here.

Another managed print services provider did the same for its healthcare customers. Using PrinterLogic in a Citrix environment, EPIC Management was able to roll out reliable, easy-to-use secure release printing to busy medical staff. Read that case study here.

But don’t assume that PrinterLogic’s benefits are limited to organizations that make use of managed print services. Just take a second or two and sign up for a free PrinterLogic demo. For the next 30 days, you’ll have the opportunity to see exactly how pull printing and PrinterLogic’s serverless printing infrastructure can increase security and save money for your company.

Convenience, cost-efficiency and security don’t always arrive as a set. You might find an IT solution with two out of the three if you’re lucky. But scoring the hat trick is rare.

When it comes to your print environment, pull printing with PrinterLogic is a proven way to achieve all three.

Pull printing is an approach that splits printing into two steps. First, the user clicks “Print”—or taps it, in the case of mobile printing—just as they normally would. Second, the user issues a command to release their print job. Far from being an inconvenience, that second step is key to pull printing’s effectiveness.

You can also beef up the inherent security of pull printing by making authentication part of the second step. This is often called secure release printing. Before we talk about that, though, let’s see how pull printing alone can save time and money.

What Pull Printing Looks Like in the Real World

In many organizations, printing is fully automated. The user clicks “Print” and their job goes to whatever printer was selected at the time. Unfortunately, automation doesn’t always make things more convenient.

• If users are mobile, they don’t always want to print to the same default printer.
• If users have a habit of forgetting to claim their print jobs, it wastes toner and paper.
• And if users are printing sensitive information, it’s risky if the document prints out before they can get to the printer.

Pull printing is ideal for all these scenarios:

• Mobile users can choose their target printer after they’ve already clicked print on the document, so printing on the go is much more convenient.
• Forgetful users are far more likely to claim the jobs they print. That helps keep the cost of consumables down.
• Users who print confidential documents can ensure they’re physically present before the job prints.

Users can easily access their waiting pull-print jobs through our Print Release App, the printer’s built-in control panel or even a mobile device in kiosk mode that’s associated with a specific printer.

PrinterLogic allows admins to enable any networked printer for pull printing. That means you can use it with your existing printer fleet. PrinterLogic also features a centralized admin console, which makes it easy for admins to roll out pull printing anywhere in the organizations.

The Next Level: Secure Release Printing

As I mentioned earlier, pull printing that requires authentication to perform the release step is typically called secure release printing.

 This clearly introduces an added layer of security. Print jobs can only be executed by the user who initiated them. PrinterLogic’s serverless printing infrastructure adds even more security because waiting print jobs are held on the original workstation and not in a shared job queue.

PrinterLogic also brings flexibility to secure printing. Along with our Print Release App, organizations can choose from several other fully supported authentication schemes.

• Entering a PIN or password on the printer’ control panel (native support on Sharp and Canon models with more to come).
• Swiping a badge or ID card on a connected card reader.
• Using a CAC or PIV card (often in federal agencies and their contractors).

Increase Convenience and Security, Decrease Printing Costs

Whether you choose to implement pull printing or take it one step further with secure printing, the benefits are largely the same.

• The waste from unclaimed documents—20% of all printed output, according to one study—is less likely to be generated when printing is more intentional.
• Confidential documents are at less risk of exposure because they don’t end up sitting in the output tray.
• And mobile users will have more control and higher productivity when they can easily choose their destination printer on the fly.

EPIC Management, L.P. saw these multiple benefits from a single solution. This California-based company used PrinterLogic to provide secure printing capabilities to medical staff who needed to comply with protected healthcare information (PHI) regulations. In a complex Citrix virtual environment, no less. (Read the case study here.) 

Georgia’s Fulton County School System did the same thing in a completely different industry and use case. Their IT department put PrinterLogic’s seamless pull printing into the hands of their administrative staff as a way to add flexibility, security and control. (Read that case study here.)

PrinterLogic can do the same for your organization too. We offer a no-cost, 30-day demo so you can see how our next-gen solution can not only provide you with pull or secure printing but eliminate print servers completely. Simply sign up for your free PrinterLogic trial today.

At a time when we seem to have data on everything, enterprise print environments can still be something of a mystery. 

Organizations might track page counts, which is common practice when using managed print services. Or they might keep track of the total cost of consumables like paper and toner. But comprehensive, actionable data on print activity can be hard to come by.

Gaining more visibility into the print environment is also sometimes a distant priority. Given the limited auditing tools offered by most printing solutions—not to mention the complexity of server-based print infrastructures—a lot of IT admins just end up focusing on print management. Who has time for printer consolidation initiatives when just deploying printers is so much hassle?

Print auditing and reporting with PrinterLogic changes all that. It makes it easier to gather (and share) useful micro- and macro-level information on your entire print environment. And by easing the burden of routine print management, PrinterLogic allows you to prioritize and act on the info that print auditing provides.

How Does PrinterLogic’s Print Auditing Solution Work?

PrinterLogic’s advanced reporting capabilities extend across your print environment—even to USB-connected printers. That means you can collect detailed info on print activity right down to the device and user level. Anywhere in the organization.

Using PrinterLogic’s web-based admin console, for example, you can easily view stats on color printing, document types, duplexing and application usage. These stats are shown as both text and graphs. You can even dive deeper and look at when individual jobs were printed along with the filenames of the print jobs.

Here’s a small sample of the custom reporting options with PrinterLogic.

• Summary of print activity by location
• Print activity during a given time period
• Job and page counts
• Black and white versus color
• Printing usage by paper size

Auditing doesn’t do much good if the data doesn’t end up in front of decision makers. Which is why PrinterLogic makes it easy to share it. You can either export print activity data as a CSV or you can have it automatically emailed to department heads or the CFO.

This short video shows PrinterLogic’s print auditing in action.

Benefits of Print Auditing in the Workplace

Now that the how of PrinterLogic’s advanced reporting is clear, it’s time to talk about the why. As in, what’s the point of accessing all this data?

The simple answer is that it allows your organization to make more informed—and cost-saving—choices.

If you see that one user is printing out a lot of files titled “Party_Invite.pdf” and “Garage_Sale_Poster.png” on the color printer, you can take steps to minimize their personal printing. Or if there’s a printer that only receives a few jobs each week, you can use it to balance the load at a location with heavier printing needs.

Even if your company uses managed print services, you can leverage PrinterLogic’s data to verify the counts provided by your MSP.

As for infrastructure optimization, PrinterLogic’s powerful print auditing and SNMP monitoring allow you to adjust your printer fleet to address current printing trends. Is there one printer that’s generating a large number of error alerts? And what happens if two or three employees are responsible for most of their department’s print usage? With PrinterLogic, you can see which printers to retire or how to rearrange them for lowered costs and increased productivity.

Good Print Auditing Makes Good Print Management

This is where PrinterLogic’s effortless print management comes into play. Unlike cumbersome legacy printing solutions, our centralized administration enables admins to create and enforce cost-effective printer policies. It only takes a few clicks to configure and apply a printer profile that defaults users to black and white after every single print job.

It’s also easier to deploy and redistribute printers, thanks to our serverless printing infrastructure. And PrinterLogic’s serverless printing doesn’t just eliminate the need for print servers. It gets rid of the need for GPOs and scripts too.

See what I mean about superior print management freeing up time to implement new printing policies and establish better printing practices? That’s exactly why Hamilton County, Indiana looked at its available printing solutions and chose PrinterLogic. Our print auditing is now helping them gain valuable insight into their distributed print environment. (Read the case study here.)

Advanced reporting is a built-in feature of our on-prem printing solution, PrinterLogic Web Stack, as well as our cloud-based printing solution, PrinterLogic SaaS. To figure out which one is right for your organization, sign up to start your PrinterLogic trial today. It’s free to test for 30 days.

We’ve flipped the page on our calendars and welcomed in the new year. So with 2019 in the rearview mirror, it’s a good time to take a look back at what happened over the past 12 months. 2019 delivered a monster year for PrinterLogic customers. Here’s a brief look at some of the very best of many PrinterLogic highlights for the past year.

New Global HQ Groundbreaking

To cope with current growth and to prep for continued expansion, we broke ground on a world class headquarters building back in May. As an anchor of the Tech Ridge business/residential/retail development in our hometown of St. George, Utah, the new HQ will occupy a prestigious address on the black mesa just east of downtown.

The PrinterLogic crew at headquarters groundbreaking

Just to confirm the rumors: the new HQ will include a basketball court, which will double as an all-hands meeting space. Views from the building overlook the original neighborhoods and commercial district of the city center.

With move-in expected in summer of 2020, the HQ will consolidate PL staff currently housed in multiple buildings into a single location. Beyond its practical purpose, the new HQ has another role. It’s an important symbol of PL’s commitment to making a tech company thrive in the Southern Utah desert.

First Acquisition Announced

We strategically expanded into an adjacent tech segment by, as business pundits say, “broadening our portfolio” with the acquisition of MaxxVault, a leading provider of enterprise content management software. PrinterLogic is still the world leader in Serverless Printing Infrastructure and will remain so. But with this acquisition we’re also in the digital workflow automation, e-forms, content management, digital signature, and secure storage space(s).

This is a major move. PL will continue to help customers “Eliminate Print Servers” as we always have. But now we will also assist business process owners to “Eliminate the analog-digital divide.”

What that means is this: in addition to our direct IP printing infrastructure business, PL will also provide software tools that customers will use to move their analog (read: paper-based) workflows to digital because it’s faster, more accurate, more scalable and less expensive.

Strategic Rebrandings

Optimizing the brand was a major emphasis at PL this past year. Getting our branding right is critical to the company’s future growth (see the previous two points in this post). Our two main PL products got new names in 2019, and the new acquisition mentioned above also became a new brand under the PL umbrella.

Our on-premises version of PrinterLogic became PrinterLogic Web Stack. And the former PrinterCloud was renamed PrinterLogic SaaS to reinforce its true software-as-a-service nature, as opposed to “cloud-based” competitors that are executables hosted on a cloud server.

The acquired MaxxVault software was rebranded under the Vasion name. Development on that product continues under the direction of MaxxVault founder Bruce Malyon. Customers can expect Vasion’s preview release in Q1 2020. 

Chrome OS support

Simply huge! PL added Chrome OS to our list of supported operating systems, which already included Windows, Mac and Linux. It gives our customers using PrinterLogic SaaS the ability to centrally manage direct IP printing for Chromebooks through the new Chrome OS Client Extension

Chromebooks already dominate in U.S. K-12 education and are well positioned for growth in the business enterprise because they’re secure, suited for mobile workers and cost less than other laptops. Typically organizations evaluating Chromebooks have a mixed network of operating systems. PL’s Chrome OS extension provides our customers two BIG advantages. It allows them to: 

1. provide their workforce secure, reliable and scalable printing and print management in mixed-OS environments for all mainstream operating systems.
2. treat Chromebooks not as mobile devices, but as equals to computers running Windows, MacOS and Linux, with the same print management features and functionality.

PrinterLogic SaaS customers can deploy the Chrome OS extension at no additional cost. The extension is currently in private preview, with general availability expected Q1 2020.

As you can see, this Best of 2019 post doesn’t even scratch the surface of all that went on for PL customers for 2019. We didn’t have enough space here to even mention the new releases, product updates and added features that were introduced last year, nor the partnerships PL solidified with some of the biggest names in tech. 

But here’s the big takeaway: 2020 is shaping up as another monster year for PL customers. All the stuff from 2019 has set the stage for an even better, stronger and more productive next 12 months. 

We can’t wait!