Print Management Tools for Multi-Location Enterprises

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**Originally published on April 26, 2016**

Enterprise print management is tough enough when you have a single location. In distributed environments, print management can be downright overwhelming because it calls for remote administration (a challenge in and of itself, even in this age of cloud computing) and a dedicated IT crew with print management tools and expertise for each site.

Why do enterprises add print servers?

The simple answer is WAN traffic becomes limited with a high number of users and heavy loads of print jobs, but typically organizations deploy additional print servers as a way to cope with print management in multi-location environments. Adding print servers to an environment sounds like a good idea initially. Printing speeds might increase and the single point of failure is gone since you have other servers to lean on in case of emergencies. 

However, the more servers you add, the more resources you need to control them. Not only are you spending money on server licensing and maintenance, but you’re also stuck footing the bill for the resources and manpower to manage them. 

Another issue is their inherent lack of robustness makes them high-maintenance solutions—a far cry from the reliable “set it and forget it” solution that multi-location environments demand.

So, after you’ve done all the work to build a server metropolis, how do you start reining them in? 

How To Enhance Print Management in Multi-Location Environments

Eliminate Your Print Servers

It sounds harder than it really is. You’ve spent so much money and time on these servers, getting rid of them feels like a waste. However, by eliminating print servers you minimize risks to the availability of your enterprise print services. You greatly reduce your chances of a print-related breach. You don’t have to worry about draining resources on servicing or replacing your server fleet. Even in the event of a WAN outage or a host server failure, local sites can continue printing as usual.


Get Centralized Management 

A single web-based console offers access to a consistent, intuitive interface from which you can manage every printer and driver within the organization. Make individual profile changes or schedule automatic mass deployments with a few clicks—all without having to get bogged down in group policy objects (GPOs) or scripts. This is an indispensable print management tool for multi-location enterprises.


Optimize Your WAN

Many enterprise print management solutions will send print jobs across the WAN, consuming precious bandwidth and causing network congestion. By moving to direct IP printing, print jobs are sent directly from endpoint devices to printers, accelerating print times and overall network performance.


Use Self-Service Printing

Although it may seem like tensions are always high, end users are not your enemies. In fact, when it comes to print management, they can become your comrades. Empower them with Self-Service Printing that enables them to perform one-click printer installations—no matter where they happen to be. It’s a must-have for traveling employees that move between offices. This saves end users from having to call the service desk, while saving your support staff countless hours of walkthroughs and troubleshooting.


Expand Your Printing Functionality

Features like Mobile Printing, Secure Release Printing, and Advanced Reporting provide you with additional print management tools that are becoming essential for enterprise productivity. With them, you can easily accommodate your mobile/BYOD users with full-featured printing capabilities, comprehensively monitor consumables usage to target printing costs across the enterprise, and implement secure printing methods that are so straightforward, employees will have no issues utilizing them.  


Utilize Automatic Deployments for Mobile Employees

Employees are constantly on the go. Whether users are moving from floor to floor within an office or moving to various offices around the globe, they need access to printers. Usually, this requires a quick call to the service desk to get resolved and results in tedious manual labor for admins. Automatic deployments allow you to determine who has access to which printers and those printers are installed instantly on users’ workstations based on their IP addresses. This greatly decreases the number of deployment-related helpdesk calls and enhances the printing experience for the end user. 

 

Start Simplifying Multi-Location Print Management 

PrinterLogic is an enterprise print management solution that gives you the print management tools you actually need to get a handle on print environments that span multiple locations. Unlike print servers, it was designed from the ground up to meet the needs of modern enterprise print environments and seamlessly bridge the physical distance between sites. 

It increases the transparency of print management enterprise-wide, streamlines overall administration, squashes the common driver and deployment conflicts that bring print servers to their knees, empowers end users to lighten the burden on IT, and reduces the amount of oversight required to keep large-scale print environments cost-efficient and running smoothly.

Multi-location print environments can pose all kinds of hurdles that aren’t easily overcome with traditional print management solutions. PrinterLogic is different. It unifies distributed organizations and gives you complete control of your print environment from a single user interface, bringing power and simplicity to enterprise print management.

Get your free 30-day trial with PrinterLogic today.

Solving Common Printer Installation Issues

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**Originally published on Aug 12, 2016**

Printer installations are about as routine as it gets in print management. That being said, you’d think the glaring kinks would have been worked out by now.

One can always dream, right?

While many printer installations tend to go relatively smoothly, printer installation problems aren’t uncommon. On an enterprise scale, that can lead to wasted time (and consequently money) on troubleshooting network printer installation issues that could be easily avoided.

Common Printer Installation Issues

Here are printer installation woes you may have regularly encountered:

Wrong Default Printer

One of the most common printer installation problems is sending print jobs to the wrong printer following installation. Some operating systems seem to have a mind of their own in this regard resulting in the incorrect printer being selected by default—and, oddly, it’s not always the previously installed printer. 

To fix this, it’s usually just a matter of selecting the printer and using the menu options to set it as default again. But when dealing with print servers as your print management solution, it’s not unheard of for this setting to revert to the unwanted default when the user logs in again.

Inability to Print Altogether

Of course, incorrect default printer selection seems tame in light of the total loss of printing. More than a few printer installations result in the user being unable to print. There are a hundred potential causes for printer installation problems like this, with the usual suspects being driver issues. 

It could be that the selected driver isn’t compatible with the hardware or the OS on the client machine—for example, a 64-bit driver with a 32-bit system—or that the driver itself is unavailable to that particular machine because the driver wasn’t deployed initially. There might also be a residual print job in the queue preventing the new jobs from printing.

PrintNightmare Errors

These were all too common in mid-2021 after installing too many PrintNightmare patches to count. Deploying printers post-PrintNightmare was a huge hassle. For users to install printers, they needed admin privileges which ruffled the feathers of all admins alike. Printer drivers were triggered to be reinstalled despite already being on the system. Admins had to monitor and limit traffic to print servers to lessen their chances of being exploited. There was a whole laundry list of things to do just to get users their printers.

Even at the end of 2022, vulnerabilities haven’t completely disappeared. Vulnerabilities such as CVE-2022-41073 and CVE-2022-38028 showed that print spooler issues continue to be a problem. And no IT professional wants to relive that terrible dream again. 

Mobile/Cloud Printing Difficulties

Although the symptoms of mobile or cloud printer installation problems resemble their hardwired counterparts, the root causes can vary. This is because mobile and cloud printing solutions involve a lot more behind-the-scenes steps to achieve the same results. So, after a printer installation, this might result in being unable to “see” the desired device among the available destination printers, incorrect default printer selection, failed print jobs, or corrupted printer output.

 

How to Avoid Printer Installation Issues

Through its powerful combination of features, PrinterLogic’s enterprise print management solution enables you to avoid the printer installation problems mentioned above. Here are some steps you can take to minimize issues in your print environment. 

Step 1: Eliminate Your Print Servers

Print spooler vulnerabilities have been the culprit of far too many printer installation headaches. Why not get rid of your print servers completely? By moving to a cloud-native, direct IP printing platform, you get the control and insight you need to ensure pesky printing issues don’t leave your print environment paralyzed.

No more PrintNightmare, no more unpredictable chaos, and no more print server maintenance.  

Step 2: Get Centralized Print Management

Using PrinterLogic’s Admin Console, you can select the default printer for any machine by clicking a checkbox. It’s that easy. You can set the default printer for the first installation each time the user logs on or by the user’s current location. No scripting or GPOs required!

Step 3: Set Up Automated Deployments

Through the same intuitive Admin Console, it’s possible to automatically deploy drivers to end users, ensuring that the correct driver for the right printer always gets to the right user. You can even maintain a central driver repository so all client devices have access to the same pool of drivers, making printer installation a far more reliable process. Don’t want to deal with individual manufacturers anymore? We’ve got a universal driver for that. 

Step 4: Implement Mobile/BYOD Printing

PrinterLogic offers a dedicated Mobile Printing solution that bypasses the frequent causes of printer installation problems for mobile and BYOD users. Users get instant printing from any mobile device to any authorized printer—all without the need for client-side software.

Step 5: Empower Your End Users

The best print environments take pressure off admins and give end users a simplified experience. PrinterLogic’s Self-Service Installation Portal empowers users to install their own printers via a list or floor plan map. When users change their location within your company network, the portal automatically detects which printers are nearest to them.

 

Want to Get Started with Stress-Free Print Management?

Migrating to a serverless print environment is as effortless as bingewatching a full season of a Netflix series. Just ask Snider Fleet Solutions. They were able to migrate 20 of their locations in a week. Better yet, your end users will hardly notice a transition during the process.

Regardless of how many servers, users, or hardware you have, PrinterLogic provides you with a hassle-free print management experience that reduces IT workload and boosts overall productivity. 

Want to see for yourself? Click here to try PrinterLogic free for 30 days. 

What Your Print Solution Says About You

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Between the anticipation when Punxatawney Phil sees his shadow (or doesn’t) and the colorful festivities of Mardi Gras, February has a lot going on. However, nothing takes the cake quite like Valentine’s Day. It has it all: love, flowers, chocolate, and reserving a table at a restaurant where you can’t pronounce the names of the food—try ordering some vichyssoise next time you go to a French restaurant. The National Retail Federation says that we spend an average of $161 a year on showering our loved ones with gifts and surprises. I hope you’ve got your wallets ready. 

You may wonder, “What does this have to do with printing?” 

A lot. But without the chocolates, flowers, and fancy restaurants. 

 

Your Relationship With Your Print Solution

If you’re an IT professional, you’ve most likely spent a lot of time dealing with your organization’s print environment. You’ve formed an everlasting love-hate relationship with it. You’ve spent resources learning how to perfect your craft, making you the excellent IT specialist you are today. 

Relationships take work and commitment, but in the relationship between you and your print solution, you’re usually the one footing the bill. 

Today, we’re going to cover the four printing architectures, discuss what each one says about your personality, and the possible dynamics of your relationship with your print environment.

 

Print Servers (Centralized)

Must-have traits: patience, risk-taker, resilience 

Your spirit animal: Bear (Calm and strong during the toughest times.)

A little more about you: You’re even-keel in the face of a crisis. You’ll eat the gas station sushi without considering the consequences. You’re often tackling issues but always come back better than before. 

What does your relationship with a centralized print server look like?

Every printer in your organization relies on a single print server. Not only do your end users and printers rely on it…so do you. It’s the breadwinner of your print environment. When your print server fails, company-wide printing does too. Productivity comes to a complete halt and everyone looks to you for answers. Your print server is high maintenance and requires regular upkeep to ensure print goes smoothly. But you’re willing to take the risk because at least you can see what is going on in your print environment. 

Most of the calls to the helpdesk are because of slow print jobs and failed printer installations. Scripts and GPOs are a headache, and you’re probably still reeling after the whole PrintNightmare scare. Despite all the hardships, you always remain patient with your print server and end users. 

In the back of your mind, you know there is a better solution out there but you’re finding it hard to break up with something you’ve spent so many years with. 

 

Print Servers (Decentralized)

Must-have traits: high-roller, over-achiever, workaholic 

Your spirit animal: Lion (Always in attack mode and striving to stay courageous in times of turmoil.)

A little more about you: You aren’t scared of the future and are worried about how you can get it done now. When people ask you to run a mile, you run a marathon instead. Work is your life, and you have the answer to all IT problems (or are expected to, at least). 

What does your relationship with decentralized print servers look like?

Decentralized print server architecture means you have multiple servers to cover printing for all your organization’s remote locations. If your company has 100 offices, you’ve probably got close to 100 print servers to manage. Print servers aren’t cheap to license and maintain, but that doesn’t stop you. You’re not scared to fork over money on new hardware to maintain your print environment. 

Every time a new print server gets added to your environment, your workload increases, and you’re stuck putting out fires for different locations every time WAN traffic gets congested. It’s hard to keep up with all the deployments necessary to allow your users to install printers. Plus, for every office your company adds, you have to get print servers up and running for new users —usually on a short timeline. 

It’s not an easy job. But, with a lion as your spirit animal, you’re more than capable of overcoming stressful GPO deployments and frequent off-site visits to address printing issues. However, you realize that more print servers mean more problems and you’re considering shutting the relationship down.  

 

Unmanaged Direct IP

Must-have traits: adventurous, alert, helpful

Your spirit animal: Wolf (React based on instinct and thrive with their communication skills.)

A little more about you: You don’t like staying still and are always looking for something to do. When issues arise, you pride yourself on being able to be there before things go south. You love educating others, especially when discussing a topic you’re interested in. 

What does your relationship with unmanaged direct IP printing look like?

When something is unmanaged, you can expect to live adventurously every day you go to work. Whether it is another printer installation (and there are a lot of those) or a “my printer’s out of ink” request, you’re always on the move answering helpdesk calls and lending a helping hand to your end users. You love educating end users on how to install printers, but you don’t like that most of your helpdesk calls involve installing printers for new hires or hybrid employees. 

Here’s where things get a bit murky for you. 

You want to help your company save money and identify areas of improvement, but you’re unable to track print activity and have almost no idea how much is being spent on printing. To ensure huge problems don’t occur, you have to regularly walk around and check the status of your printers and rely on your instincts or end users to tell you something needs to be fixed—leading to high amounts of stress. 

All you want is more control and insight. But at what cost?

 

Centralized Direct IP

Must-have traits: innovative, adept, precise

Your spirit animal: Horse (Willing to explore new areas and seek places where they can roam freely.)

A little more about you: You often create new recipes instead of eating the same thing twice. You master new things with ease. You always want the exact answer and like to avoid beating around the bush. 

What does your relationship with centralized direct IP printing look like?

In this relationship, the communication between you and your print environment is rock-solid. In a centralized direct IP setting, you’re alerted before issues happen, and you can easily track print jobs and accurately calculate the cost of printing in your organization. Deployments are easier without GPOs and scripts. You feel secure and safe from all the cyber attackers trying to steal your data. 

Any time new users join your network, you just tick a box and users receive access to any authorized network printers. You’re able to adopt new security standards and have set your print environment up for future success—free from security vulnerabilities. 

Most of all, your end users become your best friends since they can self-install their own printers without asking you for help. 

Everything is consistent—just the way you like it. 

 

Looking to fall in love all over again?

No relationship is perfect. Breaking up with your current printing infrastructure is hard and we know it. But when you’re giving to your print environment and not getting anything in return, it might be time to cut ties.

PrinterLogic is available and prepared to help you move on. 

Our centralized, direct IP printing platform will help you renew the love you lost with print servers and unmanaged, direct IP print environments. Here’s how we do it: 

  1. Eliminate your print servers (You never liked them anyway.)
  2. Remove scripts and GPOs (It’ll be like they never existed.) 
  3. Move you to our cloud-native platform (Seriously. You’ll be on cloud nine.)

Ready for your first date with PrinterLogic? 

Click here for a free 30-day trial!

Why You Should Start Using Print Analytics

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**Originally published on January 7, 2019**

We live in the age of Big Data. Massive upticks in the amount of information organizations are tasked with collecting and analyzing can no longer be conceptualized using run-of-the-mill, traditional methods. 

Though, with the right tools, you can gain unprecedented insight into activity, costs, and trends that were invisible before. You can then use that insight as the basis for everything from small-scale behavioral changes to sweeping efficiency initiatives, which can streamline operations and save money over the long term. 

Enterprise printing analytics is a perfect case in point.

 

No Print Control, No Savings

Sure, “guesstimating” how much your print environment costs you seems more convenient than delving into specifics. However, overlooking specifics such as the volume of color print jobs or simplex vs. duplex could be costing you more than you can fathom. 

Gartner estimates that an organization’s total print costs account for anywhere from 1–3% of its overall revenue. This is a significant amount of money. A company with annual revenue of $10 million can expect to spend up to $300,000 on print management. However, with more control, companies can start saving. One study even points out that maintaining better control over office printing can reduce print spending by as much as 30%.

Even if you were to apply ballpark figures, using the stats above to compare your organization’s actual print spending with potential savings highlights how much money could be recouped with the right enterprise printing solution.

Nevertheless, ballpark figures aren’t good enough when developing a strategic plan to tighten print control and reduce print spending. You need to hone in on specifics, and that’s not always possible with most enterprise printing solutions out of the box. 

To truly understand your print environment and make cost-saving improvements, it’s essential to have full awareness of detailed print costs and to be able to tie those costs to real-world activity at the macro and micro levels.

 

What You Gain From Increased Print Control and Oversight

Although the organization’s bottom line sees the most benefit, the usefulness of print analytics goes beyond a simple dollar value. It helps you identify areas you can improve to ease your workload and enhance the experience for end users.

For example, with a clear view into your entire print environment, regardless of its scale, you can start seeing how the number and size of print jobs vary across your network. 

Are there remote locations that are generating high levels of print traffic?

Are there specific printers that are being over or underutilized?

Are these the possible causes of print-related support tickets? 

In-depth print-auditing capabilities can help answer those questions. The same goes for streamlining processes. 

Sound enterprise printing analytics can help identify print activity that leads to errors or inefficient protocols. If one ordinary user prints a disproportionate amount of color documents, it’s clear the default driver profile settings (or after-hours printing) need to be updated. Or, if the vast majority of users in a department are printing to a single device while another nearby printer is seeing very little use, then it’s time to start examining how their printers are installed.

And let’s not forget an overlooked advantage of increased print control: security. 

With a complete digital trail for secure documents, admins can quickly identify and review suspicious print activity or provide the information that e-forensics teams need for investigations. This magnified insight into your print environment is a must-have in Zero Trust Network Architecture. 

Yet, few enterprise printing solutions offer comprehensive enterprise printing analytics worthy of the name. What’s needed is a next-generation solution capable of providing a full suite of advanced reporting and auditing features.

 

Analyze Every Aspect of Printing

From the moment of implementation, PrinterLogic puts powerful enterprise printing analytics at your fingertips. Examine your print environment through the lens of advanced data points (e.g., print job date/time, document name, color vs. grayscale) and quickly determine which network printers see the heaviest utilization over a specific time period. 

You can even link the usage data to the actual cost of printing. This means you can easily break down print-related cost by those all-important specifics that are so elusive when using other enterprise printing solutions.

PrinterLogic’s print auditing features also allow you to pinpoint your top users by print volume and be alerted when classified documents are printed. This information is incredibly useful in those rare—but sadly, not rare enough—cases when a departing employee is printing out privileged client lists or other confidential documents. 

This highlights further how in-depth print analytics can feed into strengthening print security.

Want to keep higher-ups in the loop about how much money was spent on printing? PrinterLogic has a built-in reporting function that can automatically email print activity to department heads and decision-makers at scheduled intervals. AAA Carolinas benefited greatly from this feature and saved “a pretty good stack of dollars” simply by identifying unnecessary color printing and exerting better print control over monochrome defaults.

Implementing these enterprise printing analytics in your print environment is just a click away.

Provide your organization with print analytics that equates to more control, more oversight, and more cost-saving opportunities than ever before.

Sign up today for a free 30-day trial of PrinterLogic’s serverless print management solution. 

3 Key Benefits of Enterprise Mobile Printing with PrinterLogic

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**Originally Published May 12, 2020**

There’s no question that the pandemic played a huge role in making enterprise mobile printing the new “cool kid” at the lunch table. But, it hasn’t exactly been a walk in the park to implement. The reason for this is simple. When the mobile revolution meets enterprise printing, it can feel more like a head-on collision than a synergy. You’ve got users with all different kinds of smartphones and tablets who want to print to all different kinds of printers.

According to a 2022 Future of BYOD report, 87% of businesses now rely on their employees to access applications through their own mobile devices. They count on workers to use their mobile devices outside of work to increase productivity and convenience. This signifies how a solution like mobile printing can further increase productivity in the workplace by giving mobile users a way to print on the go. 

For admins leaning toward becoming a mobile printing powerhouse, we’re here to tell you it’s not as difficult as you may think. 

Take the Uncertainty Out of Mobile Printing

It’s easy to get hung up on the unknowns of mobile printing, but if you understand what you’re trying to accomplish, it can simplify things. Here are some questions that need answers before you commit to a mobile printing solution:

  • Is it possible for your print environment to support a mix of software and hardware? 
  • How do you monitor and control authorizations? 
  • What kind of resources will you have to expend to manage it all?

To overcome potential obstacles, a mobile printing solution should offer organizations these three key benefits to make life easier for IT and their end users:

  1. It caters to dynamic environments: BYOD users, guests, and even employees visiting from remote offices can count on being able to print without calling on IT to install printers for them. 
  2. It’s compatible with any device: Every employee using mobile devices should be included right out of the gate. Mobile printing solutions must support all major smartphone and tablet brands and all major mobile operating systems.
  3. It’s compatible with any printer: You shouldn’t have to replace your printers just so you can have mobile printing capabilities. This saves you money on hardware and ensures every end user can print to any authorized network printer. 

PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing solution offers enterprises these benefits and then some. On top of our ability to eliminate print servers, our centrally managed platform makes it effortless for employees to print from mobile devices—even in the most dynamic workplaces. 

This is how our serverless printing infrastructure enabled a prominent international law firm, Hunton & Williams LLP, to eliminate its print servers completely while also introducing seamless enterprise printing support for its iOS devices. 

Mobile Printing Doesn’t Mean Sacrificing Security

While PrinterLogic’s mobile printing is easy for IT to manage and easy for employees to use, there’s no compromise when it comes to security.

  • Secure by design: PrinterLogic’s serverless printing reduces risks by eliminating print servers. Its mobile printing capabilities build on that strong foundation and give IT the tools to specify who can print to which printers.
  • Built for the hybrid workforce: Who says remote printing can’t be secure? BYOD users and contractors operating on a 5G mobile network can access the printers they need—wherever they choose to work with Off-Network Printing. 
  • Retain control: Granular options allow admins to set quotas for how much guests can print as well as the permitted file types. They can even limit printing to black and white only.
  • Printer-specific release: Authorized users can choose their preferred destination printer when printing from their mobile device. Android and iOS users can take advantage of PrinterLogic’s Mobile App Print Release feature to securely and conveniently release their print jobs.

Clearly, the time is now for your mobile/BYOD users in enterprise printing. PrinterLogic is what makes that possible, and its serverless printing infrastructure can fully eliminate your print servers (and their vulnerabilities) in the process.

Cloud Print Management vs. Cloud Printing

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**Originally published July 12, 2017**

When you hear folks talking about cloud printing, it’s hard not to get a little excited. The key benefits, such as access to select printers from almost anywhere and simplified printing from mobile devices, are impressive—particularly in light of today’s dynamic, mobile, and ever-changing workplace.

But there’s a big difference between cloud print management and cloud printing. This can get especially confusing when you’re researching cloud print solutions because many companies claim to offer true cloud printing while still using outdated print technology. 

New Cloud Technology vs Legacy Infrastructure

No one will argue that cloud printing comes with some wonderful advantages, yet it continues to be hampered by the traditional print management solutions that most organizations still have in place. This legacy infrastructure—usually in the form of print servers—can make cloud print setup much more difficult than it should be (if it’s even possible).

Furthermore, many cloud print solutions have fundamental limitations that take some of the shine off cloud print setup and cloud printing in general. For instance, most of the popular cloud print solutions require that you use special printers, which restricts your options, or they want your existing printers to be connected to an always-on PC running special software, which drives up the cost and complexity of your infrastructure. They also can’t always promise universal compatibility with different printer drivers and operating systems.

So What Is Cloud Print Management?

Cloud print management has the ability to deliver all the benefits of cloud printing along with next-generation print management that makes print servers seem like 19th-century technology by comparison. That’s because cloud print management—when it’s done right—truly breaks free from the conventional model of on-premises infrastructure and puts all aspects of enterprise printing into the cloud, where it’s always accessible, always manageable, always available.

However, you’ll note that I made a point to include the caveat when it’s done right in the previous sentence. 

As more and more organizations look to cloud print solutions to address their enterprise printing needs, an increasing number of cloud printing providers have naturally sought to fill that expanding niche. However, cloud print management is not an easy thing to get right, and lesser cloud print solutions can quickly leave you wishing that you’d never ventured into cloud printing in the first place.

Cloud Print Management with PrinterLogic

PrinterLogic has a proven pedigree as a cloud-native solution. It leverages PrinterLogic’s acclaimed on-premises print management solution and essentially transfers it to a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, thereby allowing you to enjoy the benefits of both effortless cloud printing and effortless cloud print management.

With PrinterLogic SaaS, cloud print setup is easy. From the moment you start, you can simply migrate all of your printers—including profiles, drivers, settings, you name it—from your print server using an easy migration tool. After that, you can add new printers, deploy printer drivers, manage queues, and edit print profiles across your entire organization from a single Admin Console.

Plus, PrinterLogic makes it possible for you to shrink your traditional print infrastructure down to its most efficient, cost-effective state. Our many features allow you to consolidate network printers and even completely eliminate your print servers while enjoying more robust cloud printing capabilities than other cloud print solutions are able to deliver—and all in a secure environment.

So remember, cloud printing is only half of the story. The right cloud print management will migrate your organization’s printing to the cloud with maximum benefit and offer a seamless experience that’s more efficient, more secure, and easier to use.

Reduce IT Support and Helpdesk Calls Through Infrastructure Reduction

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**Originally published on October 17, 2019**

Over time, enterprise print environments can turn into big, unwieldy beasts. Printer fleets tend to keep growing. The number of print servers keeps increasing to scale. And then, of course, sometimes you need multiple IT printing solutions to handle specialized tasks.

The larger and denser our print environments become, the more complex they get. That complexity takes its toll on productivity because more things can go wrong. It also ends up costing money. Each time something goes wrong, resources must be diverted to fix it.

Why should you reduce print infrastructure?

You should consider reducing your print infrastructure for a few important reasons:

Unpredictable Issues: Problems with incompatible drivers, GPO printer deployments, and spooler vulnerabilities lead to complications for admins and users.

Excessive Helpdesk Tickets: Anytime an end user has print-related issues, they ultimately call the helpdesk to ask for help. IT staff can sometimes spend up to 40% of their day on print-related tickets. 

Incompatibility With Modern Solutions: Print servers are a legacy system that is incompatible with modern print solutions—making improvements to traditional print environments harder to come by. 

But how is infrastructure reduction possible in a world where print servers are still the status quo? 

If you start taking away print servers, that only increases the strain on the ones that are left. And that will only compound your organization’s printing problems.

Next-gen serverless printing solutions enable you to eliminate print servers without risk or drawbacks. You can have even more availability, scalability, and features while streamlining your print infrastructure.

That’s what leads to the added benefits of infrastructure reduction. You don’t just get rid of unnecessary software and hardware by going serverless. You also get unparalleled ease of use for admins and end users alike. That saves time—and money—in a big way.

Here are a few additional ways infrastructure reduction can enhance your print environment. 

Optimize Print Infrastructure

When IT pros think about eliminating print servers, they often focus on the functionality they think they’ll lose. Instead, it’s better to consider all the ways print servers complicate day-to-day printing. Single points of failure. Poor driver management. Complex printer installation procedures. Unreliable deployments with unreliable GPOs and scripts.

When put in those terms, you can see how eliminating print servers can actually remove the many barriers they pose to printing.

Serverless printing solutions provide all the functionality of standard IT printing solutions without all their baggage. With those issues gone, end users have a more stable, predictable printing experience. They don’t need to call the helpdesk for assistance all the time.

Reduce Costs

Streamlining the print environment through infrastructure reduction means less for admins to oversee and maintain. There’s less to upgrade and license. All of that saves ongoing costs. And those savings add up quickly.

It’s also got knock-on effects. When admins aren’t putting out fires and dealing with support tickets, they can spend time making the print environment even more efficient. That leads to even fewer helpdesk calls, which frees up the support staff to focus on further optimizations. Which then makes things even better for your end users.

The bonus of that positive loop? All of that saved time and efficiency becomes another source of cost savings.

Enjoy More Features by Going Serverless

To get more features from legacy IT printing solutions, you typically have to add more solutions to the mix. That creates more to manage and more potential for incompatibility.

PrinterLogic is so feature-rich that you can consolidate your entire print environment in a single software solution. Its centralized Admin Console lets you monitor and manage the entire print environment from a single pane of glass. You can configure advanced printer deployments without touching a GPO or script from a single UI. 

The core of our serverless printing solutions can be easily augmented, too. PrinterLogic’s Mobile Printing functionality offers native printing from iOS and Android devices. It even supports guest and BYOD devices through multiple print methods.

And Mobile Printing is just one example of how extensible PrinterLogic can be. Its optional feature set also includes easy Secure Release Printing and Advanced Reporting. 

Cost Savings in Action

AAA Carolinas’ experience is an excellent example of how admins maximize the benefits of infrastructure reduction. This large, distributed organization rolled out PrinterLogic to its 2,000 users almost overnight. Migrating eliminated aging print servers, realized cost savings on several fronts, and simplified routine printer installations. Print-related support calls dropped by as many as 50 per week. Read the case study here.

By demoing our on-prem or SaaS serverless printing solutions as proof of concept, you’ll see how a single instance of PrinterLogic can replace unnecessary hardware and software. And you’ll also get a taste of the impressive ROI it can generate in the long term.

To find out how easy and cost-effective infrastructure reduction can be, start your free 30-day trial of PrinterLogic today.