Throughout the second half of the 20th century, the workplace looked pretty much the same. Then, all at once, came a bunch of technological advances. We’re talking mobile devices, high-speed Internet and powerful video-conferencing software. Old office models started to change and diversify.

These days, the workplace looks very different. It would be hard to find two that are exactly alike.

And it’s not just because of new office hygiene practices in response to COVID-19. Long before the pandemic hit, employees were already starting to work more from home or on the road. Freelancers and contractors were turning traditional businesses into the gig economy. The desk-based office was evolving into something much more dynamic.

That all had an effect on printing in the workplace. Users wanted the convenience of printing from anywhere—but without added complexity. IT admins found themselves being asked to support more BYOD and guest devices or home-based printers.

As a result, organizations need more flexibility from their print-management software. However, that need creates competing demands. IT admins now must ensure ease of use while maintaining secure printing practices.

 

The foundation for flexible printing practices

Print-management software designed for yesterday’s office isn’t suited to newer workplace models.

That’s why PrinterLogic is different. Years ago, we saw what printing in the workplace would start to look like. The future we envisioned had less print infrastructure and much more flexibility.

Print management with advanced features

Our serverless print management solution has advanced features that meet the needs of modern work environments:

• Self-service installation portal: Typically, users have to map a printer to print. This often results in asking IT to take the time to do it for them. PrinterLogic lets users easily identify and safely install printers on their own.
• Touchless printing: Updated office hygiene best practices require a new way of thinking about printing. Users need to release secure print jobs without having to physically touch the printer. With PrinterLogic’s badge release feature, users can simply swipe their ID cards, no contact required.
• Pull printing: Flexible printing means sending a print job to where you’re going to be—not where you currently are. Pull printing from PrinterLogic lets roaming users pick up a pending print job from any authorized printer.
• Email to print: Making it possible for remote employees to print on office printers presents a challenge. It often involves cumbersome VPN setups. That’s why PrinterLogic offers convenient email-to-print capabilities. Authorized off-network users can simply send their files as email attachments to approved printers.
• Mobile printing: Managing BYOD and guest devices can be a huge pain point for IT admins. With PrinterLogic’s mobile printing feature, you can effortlessly support native printing from iOS and Android devices.

This set of features helps organizations print simply and securely. And it’s possible regardless of how they’re configured.

 

A print-management solution for today and tomorrow

There’s no doubt that the workplace was already in flux before COVID-19. And there’s also no doubt that it will keep changing in the years to come.

A SaaS print-management solution like PrinterLogic is here to help. Enable your organization stay several steps ahead of that change. Our centrally managed direct-IP printing solution eliminates existing print servers. Furthermore, it brings added flexibility to your workflows. PrinterLogic even supports emerging initiatives around improving secure printing and office hygiene.

Remote workers and BYOD devices have made printing in the workplace a challenge. Legacy print-management approaches simply don’t support a mobile workforce. Along with its modern take on print management, PrinterLogic provides a scalable, flexible printing solution. It admins can meet those challenges, and any others that might lie ahead.

Corporate printing should work for your employees. But that’s not always the case. A lot of times that relationship is upside-down. Employees are forced to adjust to the printing environment instead. 

Mobile printing is a good example of this. Enterprise surveys show that employees really want to use their own devices.

• More than half of workers aged 30+ prefer their own devices. For Gen Y, it’s over 60%.
• Employees save almost one hour each day with mobile devices. Furthermore, their productivity goes up 34%.

As a result, many companies have BYOD policies these days. These policies allow employees to use their own tablets and smartphones. Which is a great idea—until it comes time for them to print. That’s when they find that printing isn’t BYOD friendly.

 

Common BYOD issues

Mobile print jobs often look something like this:

1. The employee wants to print to a nearby printer. But they can’t.
2. They struggle for a bit on their own.
3. They call the helpdesk and ask for technical support.
4. The helpdesk has to spend time assessing the situation.
5. IT receives a support ticket and has to revisit the issue.
6. IT makes the proper changes in the print management software.
7. The employee is told that they can finally print—or not, if their device is unsupported.

That’s at least seven frustrating steps! It hurts productivity, limiting the benefits of BYOD. Plus, the extra time spent on support adds to printing costs.

In an ideal world, mobile printing should look more like this:

1. The employee wants to print to a nearby printer from a mobile device.
2. They send their print job using a clear, convenient method.

Those are two steps that anyone can master. So, how can you make BYOD and mobile printing that easy?

 

The simple way to more adaptable corporate printing

PrinterLogic’s mobile printing solution makes your print environment work for you.

First, it gets rid of the usual runaround. Employees don’t need to get authorization to install printers. They can just visit PrinterLogic’s self-service installation portal instead. There they can view and add printers with one click. No need to call the helpdesk or IT. 

Second, iOS and Android users can print natively. And they don’t need to install client-side software to do it. All it takes is a tap of the “Share” button.

Third, guest users can print easily too. Even if they’re off-network. They just have to send an email to the printer’s unique address. Any attachments will be printed just like regular print jobs.

But PrinterLogic is more than a mobile printing solution. It’s a print-management solution too. And PrinterLogic’s admin console is the control center. It gives IT total command over printer access and print activity. Therefore security stays balanced with ease of use.

 

More productivity for everyone

Hunton & Williams LLP is an international law firm. It saw more and more requests to print from iOS devices. But it didn’t see a simple way to meet that demand. PrinterLogic’s combo of easy mobile printing and powerful print-management software made it possible. Read the case study here.

In addition to introducing easy mobile printing, PrinterLogic eliminated the firm’s print servers. That helped reduce overall corporate printing costs. Similarly, it also made print management more efficient. Now the IT team can spend more time on important things.

Do you have questions about the specifics? To see how PrinterLogic works, be sure to read our mobile printing whitepaper.

Saber Healthcare Group consults with about 125 long-term nursing facilities plus a smaller number of assisted-living facilities and physical therapy services. We’re based just outside of Cleveland, Ohio, but you can find these facilities across the eastern United States.

Around 2014, Saber started growing through a string of new locations. Over the next six years our company increased roughly 600% in size. During that process, we basically just absorbed any IT infrastructure that was onsite. That was a lot for the IT team to handle—especially when it came to the print environment. We wound up with a mix of printers: Brother, Konica-Minolta, HP, a couple Ricoh and Xerox machines, you name it.

When I joined Saber’s IT department in 2018, my first task was a company-wide printer fleet inventory and standardization. I immediately recommended PrinterLogic based on my past experience. Not only was I confident that it would help standardize our print environment, I knew that it would work well with Citrix Virtual Apps and PointClickCare EMR software that Saber relies on.

 

Taking back control

Our medical staff is on the front lines taking care of patients. They need round-the-clock print capabilities, even when they change to a different building. But when you’ve got 130 buildings and hundreds of regional staff out moving in the field, you can imagine the economies of scale and place. The IT department used to get flooded with support tickets to get printers installed.

Once we rolled out PrinterLogic, those installation requests pretty much vanished. That’s because end users were now getting their printers automatically through location-based (IP) deployments. Or they’d use PrinterLogic’s self-service installation portal. My colleague Amy Sharo, who oversees Saber’s help desk, said it was a “ridiculous” weight off her shoulders.

 

Integrating and managing Chromebooks

In 2019, we started issuing Chromebooks to our physical therapists. That was great from a computing standpoint, but it led to us having to manage Chromebooks separately in the Google Cloud Print console. It was like adding an extra print environment when we were trying to streamline everything.

Then Google dropped the news that Cloud Print was end-of-life. So we had to look for a replacement—but ideally one without the same management headaches.

PrinterLogic SaaS ended up being the only solution we needed. It has a Chrome OS Client Extension that lets us manage Chromebooks just like any other endpoint. And we can do it all from one window with the PrinterLogic Admin Console. It also made things easier in terms of ease of setup, flexibility and cost savings, because it’s a zero-footprint cloud solution that we can quickly extend to any location.

Better yet, we migrated from PrinterLogic Web Stack to PrinterLogic SaaS in one day.

 

Adding value and security

At Saber, we take protected health information (PHI) very seriously. Our staff is trained to safeguard sensitive patient information through measures like secure release printing, which requires print jobs to be authenticated. The thing is, with most printing solutions, secure release printing can be awkward for end users. Furthermore, it can be a huge hassle for admins to implement.

PrinterLogic SaaS allowed us to test drive a native Control Panel Application for Konica-Minolta devices. Instead of having to swipe a badge, users can authenticate their print jobs by just entering their PIN code on the printer’s embedded touchscreen. In the long run, that’s going to make it much easier for us at Saber to be compliant with PHI and HIPAA regulations.

 

A solution for healthcare printing—and much more

It’s pretty remarkable to think of how many problems we eliminated with just one solution.

If you look at just the print-related benefits alone, we succeeded in cutting help desk tickets by something like 75%. And we found a superior replacement to Google Cloud Print for Chromebook printing.

From a resource perspective, however, PrinterLogic has really lowered a lot of our overhead—from infrastructure to personnel. It helped us get everything under the same umbrella, and any future sites we add will be much easier to integrate. PrinterLogic simply lifts a lot of the day-to-day burden off the IT department, and it gives our end users more power, more convenience and more security.

Taken together, all those advantages have been huge.

There are four current trends in enterprise printing that aren’t just changing the way we print. They’re also transforming the modern workplace for IT and end users alike.

1. BYOD and mobile printing
2. Advanced reporting
3. Print security
4. Infrastructure reduction

We’re going to take a brief look at each of these trends below. We’ll also see which enterprise printing solution allows you to capitalize on them.

1. BYOD and mobile printing

Now that there’s a smartphone in almost every hand, end users naturally want to print from them. And while three-quarters of companies have said that mobile devices are essential to their employees and their workflows, they also acknowledge that mobile printing in the enterprise hasn’t been easy.

For starters, it’s been tough for them to give smartphones and tablets—especially user-sourced BYOD devices—desktop-class enterprise printing capabilities. The other hurdle is mobility itself. When users are regularly moving from location to location, how can you be sure that they’re able to print to the right printers?

Despite the challenges around mobile printing, it’s a trend that is only getting stronger. In many organizations, mobile printing is already vital to their productivity.

2. Advanced reporting

One result of BYOD/mobile printing is that it introduces lots of new devices into the print environment. That creates a corresponding need for IT professionals: more insight into the state of enterprise printing as a whole. Basically, if a user wants to print, IT has to know about it and be able to monitor their print activity.

That’s why the adoption of advanced reporting has followed hot on the heels of mobile printing. A feature like this gives transparency to the print environment without requiring constant IT supervision.

But advanced reporting can do more than increase visibility. It allows IT to identify printer malfunctions with more speed and accuracy. It helps identify excessive print usage with a view to reducing costs. And the added oversight increases security.

3. Print security

On that note, companies are acutely aware of how important security is to their enterprise printing. They also know that their current print infrastructures aren’t up to snuff. Already they’ve begun taking active steps to beef up their secure printing efforts. That’s only going to intensify in 2020.

You’ll soon start to see increased uptake of features like secure release printing. This adds an authentication step to the printing process, ensuring that confidential print jobs stay in the hands of the users who printed them. Multifactor authentication and cloud identity providers (IdPs) will be a big part of the secure printing equation too.

This also means that you could start seeing a move away from print servers toward new forms of direct IP printing. Print servers are an attractive target for malicious actors because they channel print traffic from all over the organization. Direct IP printing, on the other hand, keeps print jobs on the local network.

4. Infrastructure reduction

Another benefit of direct IP printing is infrastructure reduction. When clients are able to print straight to printers without that connection being negotiated by a print server, those print servers can be eliminated. Along with all their hassle and costs.

Of course, streamlining is nothing new. Organizations have sought to shrink the hardware and software footprint of their enterprise printing for ages. Cloud migration is just the latest wave of that streamlining push, although it’s certainly helped to accelerate it.

Direct IP printing has been around for a long time too. But recent leaps in technology have resulted in a new generation of direct IP printing that enables organizations to jettison legacy infrastructure without sacrificing functionality.

PrinterLogic is the trendsetter in enterprise printing  

Your organization can start taking advantage of all these trends within a matter of days. PrinterLogic is a serverless printing infrastructure that combines next-gen direct IP printing with centralized management, giving you control over your entire print environment from a single pane of glass.

With PrinterLogic, features like advanced reporting, mobile printing and secure release printing don’t need to be layered on. They’re actually optional extensions of PrinterLogic’s core functionality. That makes them easy to implement, easy to manage and easy to use.

On the strength of PrinterLogic’s direct IP printing architecture, an organization like the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) was able to eliminate print servers and introduce more secure printing alongside higher print availability. Read the case study here.

Many organizations of equal size and complexity have migrated from print servers to PrinterLogic in under a week. Instead of following the trends in enterprise printing, they’re easily staying ahead of them. And saving time and money in the process.

As much as some folks like to brag about their ability to multitask, we all know by now that multitasking just isn’t efficient. Our brains prefer to focus on a single task rather than be pulled in different directions.

That applies to IT departments too. When IT staff are busy leaping from one urgent task to another, it can be hard for them to work efficiently.

A dysfunctional print environment only makes matters worse. The very nature of print management and printer support often forces IT departments to operate in response mode, which can be a huge resource drain in and of itself.

 

How does printing hurt IT inefficiency?

Sometimes it can seem like everything about enterprise printing is working against you. But inefficiency generally boils down to three major print-related contributors:

• Basic troubleshooting and routine printer support. This usually takes the form of printer installation requests or vague “I can’t print” messages from end users. In many organizations, managing the print environment is a lot like babysitting.
• A heterogeneous print environment. Supporting multiple brands and models of printers makes it way more challenging to manage printer drivers and troubleshoot printing problems. Complexity is the enemy of efficiency.
• End-user frustration. When employees feel like they’re being forced to waste time and overcome printing hurdles, they tend to file unnecessary helpdesk tickets. And that just compounds the existing printer support headache.

 

Keep your print environment under control

There are a couple things your IT department can start doing right away to get back on top of things.

• Give the IT team time to explore new technologies. The status quo is probably holding you back. One advancement worth exploring is serverless printing, which streamlines the print environment in multiple ways. 
• Look into advanced printing features. Depending on their ease of implementation, ‘bonus’ features like mobile printing or secure release printing could make your end users more productive. And therefore more content.
• Simplify your print infrastructure. Reducing your printer fleet and eliminating print servers cuts down on IT overhead. That gives IT staff the freedom to concentrate on future paths to optimization.
• Train IT employees in print management. If just one or two admins are responsible for all things print-related, maybe it’s time to familiarize other staff members with that area. Training can also introduce helpful new perspectives.

Distilling these tips into one simple piece of advice would run something like this: Empower your IT department with the right tools to innovate.

 

Ditch your print servers for PrinterLogic

All the good intentions in the world won’t amount to much if your current printing solution keeps you in the weeds. If your IT department is constantly diverted by printer support, there’s simply no way to get the time you need for things like training, researching new technologies or brainstorming different approaches.

PrinterLogic’s serverless printing infrastructure is what provides that first vital push over the print management threshold. Its centrally managed direct IP printing eliminates print servers—and all their hassle—while consolidating management in a single admin console.

From there, your IT department can then easily roll out features like mobile/BYOD printing. Or a self-service printer installation portal that gives end users the ability to identify and install printers all by themselves. That’s how the benefits of PrinterLogic’s serverless printing build on each other, delivering additional time and cost savings at every step.

Those cumulative benefits are exactly what the Lamar Consolidated Independent School District in Texas had been searching for.

Before migrating from Novell iPrint to serverless printing with PrinterLogic, their IT department was swamped with thousands of printer support tickets each year. Now they’re in the single digits. They’ve eliminated multiple print servers and are directing reclaimed print-management time toward IT optimizations and improvement. Check out the case study here.

After years of being behind the 8-ball, Lamar CSID is now ahead of the game. Just like you could be.

Server sprawl is the quiet scourge of enterprise IT environments. Like its name suggests, it’s what happens when organizations deploy more and more hardware/software infrastructure without also taking counter-steps to consolidate.

Because rolling out additional print servers is a quick fix to support new locations or growing print demand, server sprawl can disproportionately affect corporate printing. Many off-the-shelf print solutions also have heavy server-based requirements.

Server sprawl isn’t an intentional thing. No one says to themselves, “I’m going to pack my IT environment with wall-to-wall servers!” It usually just happens gradually through acquisitions or expansions. One server gets spun up for this particular purpose, another one gets added for that particular solution.

That ‘mission creep’ is exactly what happened to Schnader, a prestigious full-service law firm with offices on both coasts of the United States.

And while that infrastructure might help distribute the load, it can be an absolute nightmare to administer. It also can be a huge drain on the budget. All that extra equipment and the extra time spent managing it equals wasted dollars.

 

At risk print environments

Two kinds of print environments are more prone to server sprawl than others.

One is VDI environments. Since VDI is a server-based architecture, there’s already a tendency to spin up servers to accommodate growing user pools. The problem here, as Schnader discovered in its Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (formerly XenApp and XenDesktop) environment, is that these supplemental servers can make existing VDI printer and driver deployment challenges even worse.

The other common server-sprawl scenario is found in print environments that use distributed, or localized, print servers. This is a common printing infrastructure choice in corporate printing circles. But, similarly to the problems with VDIs, these create an inefficient, fragmented print environment that moves further and further away from the ideal of centralized print management.

 

Avoid server sprawl in your print environment

To avoid server sprawl in corporate printing, you have to eliminate print servers.

Easier said than done, right? I mean, if it were that simple, everyone would just adopt a consolidated print server model. Sure, you’d get something close to centralized print management. But you’re also introducing a major single point of failure—not to mention all the frustrations that come with increased WAN dependence.

What I’m talking about, though, isn’t exchanging one server-based model for another. I’m talking about eliminating print servers completely through a serverless, enterprise-class print solution like PrinterLogic. Just like Schnader did. Now they have the print management they always wanted without any of the cumbersome infrastructure. Read the case study here.

Eliminating print servers—and all their related cost and hassle—is how PrinterLogic stops server sprawl at its source.

 

PrinterLogic achieves far more with far less

Your first assumption might be that reducing print infrastructure would mean compromising on stability and features. But it’s actually the opposite. Serverless printing is how PrinterLogic achieves its unprecedented scalability, availability and flexibility over legacy print solutions.

By pairing centralized print management with a direct IP architecture, PrinterLogic brings benefits like these to your corporate printing:

• Effortless print management: Monitor and control the entire print environment from a single pane of glass.
• Location-based printing: Automatically deploy printers based on dynamic criteria like IP address.
• Reduced print infrastructure: Advanced reporting offers printer consolidation guidance to boost the gains of print server elimination.
• Enhanced VDI printing: Deploy native drivers to workstations, spool jobs directly on clients and much, much more.
• Optimized WAN usage: Direct IP print jobs travel straight from the client to the printer on the local network.
• Self-service printer installation: Empower end users with the ability to install printers themselves.

With PrinterLogic, it’s truly a case of less is more. Less infrastructure and headache. More functionality, ease of use and cost savings.

Most studies on enterprise technology trends have found that somewhere around 75% of companies deem mobile devices to be essential to their operations. Those same studies also point out that a similar percentage of companies struggles with BYOD adoption.

No wonder so many enterprise IT professionals have a love/hate relationship with mobile devices.

One of the most common roadblocks to BYOD policies has little to do with the devices themselves. It’s actually rooted in corporate printing. Companies naturally have a hard time getting their existing corporate infrastructure to support a random assortment of smartphones and tablets. They have an even harder time accommodating that mix of devices in their print-management software.

On top of that, several mobile printing solutions are OS- or printer-specific. They only work with certain types of mobile devices or certain types of printers. So they’re limited right out of the gate.

Understandably, all that headache and hassle over corporate printing leaves companies asking whether a wider BYOD policy is even worth it. Yet that doesn’t stop employees from repeatedly asking to use their preferred mobile devices.

 

Add mobile-friendly printing

PrinterLogic enables your company to incorporate mobile devices into the everyday printing process without any upheaval. There’s no need to abandon your current print infrastructure. There’s not even a need to go and buy new multifunction printers. And rather than adding print servers, you can eliminate them from your print environment instead.

How does that happen? Simple. PrinterLogic’s enterprise print-management solution is serverless, printer-agnostic and OS-agnostic. That means you can deploy it quickly and seamlessly in literally any corporate printing scenario. From there, you can extend mobile and BYOD printing capabilities to any client and any network printer.

 

Integrating iOS devices into corporate printing

Before we get any further, it’s important to make one thing clear: PrinterLogic’s mobile printing solution supports Android and iOS equally well. We don’t play favorites. But since iPhones and iPads are a popular BYOD option, we’re going to use them as our example here.

So let’s say you have an employee with an iPhone. For them to print to a nearby printer, all they have to do is tap the “Share” button and select a PrinterLogic printer. As long as they’re authorized, their mobile print job will then be relayed to their chosen printer just like a standard print job.

What’s notable about this is that there are no intermediary print servers to complicate things. And there’s no client-side software to install. That user’s iPad already has everything it needs to print via PrinterLogic. Furthermore, PrinterLogic’s print-management software allows admins to stay on top of devices and keep printer access locked down.

 

Next level mobile printing

That alone might be all that most companies would want. But PrinterLogic’s mobile printing solution lets you build on that with a secure print option.

The Print Release App from PrinterLogic lets end users securely release waiting print jobs right from their iOS or Android devices. If we look at that same iPhone-owning employee, in this scenario their print job(s) will be held at their workstation after initiating. The employee can then launch the Print Release App right on their smartphone, view their print jobs, and release one—or all—of them to a specific printer.

Once again, this brings a sought-after, user-friendly feature to corporate printing with minimal IT effort. There’s no software solution to provision. It even leverages the devices that are already in users’ hands. That saves costs and time while enhancing productivity.

 

Customers love PrinterLogic

All of that sounds amazing in theory. But what about in the real world?

Hunton & Williams, LLP is a renowned international law firm. Their highly mobile userbase wanted to print from BYOD iPhones and iPads, but investing in AirPrint and messing with Bonjour protocols just wasn’t an attractive option to the IT staff.

The firm migrated to PrinterLogic to solve its broader corporate printing issues and found our print-management solution to be an equally outstanding mobile printing solution. By eliminating print servers and introducing native printing from iOS devices, PrinterLogic brought newfound visibility, flexibility, ease of management and cost savings to the firm’s print environment. Check out that case study here, then be sure to schedule a free PrinterLogic demo for yourself.

As recent world events have shown us, the healthcare industry is unlike any other. Medical and administrative staff work under intense conditions that can change in a split second. They have to be flexible and adapt quickly, because their primary goal—patient care—is more than just a service. Lives hang in the balance.

For healthcare employees, technology can be their greatest ally. On occasion, it can also be a frustrating obstacle. Like when a nurse urgently needs a patient’s chart, but print jobs keep vanishing from their EMR application. Or when an essential secure printing workflow is confusing and unreliable.

 

There’s a solution for EMR printing

Many companies in this field have turned to PrinterLogic for help improving their existing healthcare printing solutions and streamlining their printing process. Here are just a few:

• Panama City Surgery Center
• Physician Partners of America
• Ohio Health
• Orthopedic Institute of New Jersey
• EPIC Management, LLP

Based on our case studies with those healthcare organizations, we’ve identified the most common printing issues that they faced. Read on to see what they are. And to discover how PrinterLogic provided them with a superior print-management solution that empowers their employees and IT staff.

 

Healthcare printing challenges

Healthcare organizations have a tendency to run into the same kinds of issues. Here, we’ll give you a rundown of what they are (and how to solve for them).

1. Distributed print environments. These can be tough to manage. Plenty of healthcare organizations have multiple sites: hospitals, clinics, specialist care centers, admin offices and so on. On top of managing a printer fleet that’s spread out across these locations, the IT department has to grapple with staff mobility. Print access is always in flux. So the challenge is more than managing printers. It’s managing users’ ability to print to them as well. 
2. Limited visibility into the print environment. To be truly efficient, IT has to have a solid fix on everything from the printer fleet to individual print jobs. But poor print-management software can cloud the window into the print environment. Conventional healthcare printing solutions don’t have the monitoring, auditing and reporting capabilities necessary to increase transparency without investing a ton of effort. 
3. Adding new printers is tedious. In a distributed print environment with limited visibility, simply adding a new printer can be time-consuming. Print servers don’t help matters. Users have to know how to map a new printer, or they have to call the helpdesk and file a support ticket. EMR applications and virtual solutions can add even more layers of complexity to routine print management.  
4. Compatibility issues with EMR/EHR. Software solutions like Cerner, Epic and MEDITECH are absolutely vital when dealing with confidential patient documents. Yet they also add one more variable to the print environment that can conflict with day-to-day printing processes as well as secure printing workflows. Some even require print servers, which only creates more print infrastructure to operate. 

 

PrinterLogic solves healthcare printing issues

 The case studies linked above are proof of how pervasive these issues are across the healthcare industry. They also highlight why PrinterLogic is effective at solving all of them at once.

• Ease of management: You can’t provide an outstanding printing solution without also having outstanding print-management software. PrinterLogic’s web-based admin console makes it easy for IT staff to view and manage printers anywhere in the organization.
• Incredible transparency: PrinterLogic’s advanced reporting capabilities allow admins to track print jobs and audit print-related activity down to the user or device levels. In addition to recording how patient information is being printed, reporting can be used as a basis for cost-saving initiatives.
• Simple printer installation: Admins can deploy printers quickly and precisely with PrinterLogic—and better still, without using GPOs or scripts. Via PrinterLogic’s self-service printer installation portal, end users can install printers themselves. That’s invaluable in fluid healthcare environments.
• Seamless EMR/EHR integration: PrinterLogic works right alongside EHR applications to ensure reliable printing while keeping patient information private. And though PrinterLogic is a serverless print infrastructure, it also enhances the print management of software solutions like MEDITECH, which require print servers.

A further advantage of PrinterLogic is how easily it improves secure printing. Healthcare documents are subject to stringent HIPAA regulations. Organizations are compelled to adopt features like secure print release or pull printing as a result.

PrinterLogic enables those organizations to extend user-friendly secure release printing to any network printer. Plus its direct IP architecture keeps print jobs safely on the local network—even when using cloud-based PrinterLogic SaaS.

No matter how distributed, dynamic or diverse your print environment is, there’s nothing that PrinterLogic can’t handle. Through its centrally managed direct-IP printing, PrinterLogic stands out among healthcare printing solutions in the way that it brings simplicity, control and flexibility to even the most demanding environments.

Consolidated printing infrastructure: pros and cons

• Increased WAN dependency: Remote branches connect to the organization’s print server via the WAN. That forces print traffic to compete for bandwidth with other data. The result is slow and unreliable printing.
• Massive single point of failure: If WAN access is interrupted, printing stops for everyone. If the print server goes down for any reason, printing stops for the entire organization. Many companies keep a backup print server to create redundancy.
• Creeping IT overhead and costs: Costs add up once you start adding secondary print servers to the environment. Consolidation has less impact when there’s more infrastructure to manage and maintain.

Localized printing infrastructure: pros and cons

• Upgrades and maintenance are expensive: Introducing more print servers might add resilience. But expanding the printing infrastructure also multiplies the costs of maintaining those servers.
• Management is more difficult: Distributing your print servers fragments the larger print environment. Each print server becomes its own sphere that needs to be managed separately. Driver management is especially challenging.

Other issues in multi-location corporate printing

PrinterLogic unifies distributed print environments

• Manage printing from anywhere in your organization. PrinterLogic’s intuitive web-based admin console lets IT manage highly distributed print environments from a single pane of glass.
• Enjoy holistic printer and driver deployment. A common driver repository and powerful advanced deployment capabilities ensure that the right printers get to the right users—automatically, reliably and consistently.
• Eliminate print servers, GPOs and scripts. Next-gen direct IP printing removes the need for server-based printing infrastructure. It also stops you from having to rely on Group Policy and scripting.
• Empower end users with advanced functionality. PrinterLogic offers secure release printing, mobile printing and even a self-service printer installation portal. All these features are easy to implement and easy to use.

While I don’t want to get down on employees (after all, I’m an employee myself), it’s no secret that their printing habits can be kind of, well, careless. The average worker prints about 34 pages a day, yet 17% of those pages go unused. Close to two-thirds of the documents they do print are thrown away or recycled on the same day.

That can have a big impact on the cost of your corporate printing. If print-related expenses add up to 3% of your company’s annual revenue, imagine how much your organization could save if your print solution helped you reduce the number of unused or recycled pages.

Then imagine how much you’d save if that same print solution could also eliminate print servers. But we’ll get to that.

 

What causes careless employee printing?

Though it’s easy to blame employees for wasteful printing habits, sometimes the reason is that they just aren’t clued into the particulars of corporate printing. Paper and toner are always supplied to them; they never see the price tag on consumables. They also overlook the fact that those costs add up to a pretty hefty chunk of change when individual waste is multiplied by every user in the organization. 

Basically, careless employee printing comes down to three things:

1. Ignorance. Employees simply lack knowledge or awareness of actual printing costs.
2. Resources. There just isn’t enough time or money to educate employees and give them the tools to print successfully on their own.
3. Oversight. The organization’s current print solution offers limited visibility into the print environment, and monitoring print activity would add one more layer of complexity to print management.

And the effects of all this aren’t limited to your organization’s bottom line. It can also pose a threat to your print security.

 

Reducing the costs of corporate printing

One immediate action you can take is to raise awareness about print waste. Once you know its sources, then you can start to curb it.

With most print management software, identifying and quantifying waste across the company can be hard to do. PrinterLogic makes it super easy. Our print solution has an advanced reporting feature that can track print jobs and calculate their real-world costs. Those reports can even be sent to department heads automatically for routine print auditing.

Another proven way to cut costs is to reduce your overall print infrastructure—starting with eliminating print servers. You can do that by upgrading to a serverless printing infrastructure like PrinterLogic. It delivers reliable, feature-rich printing alongside centralized management from a single pane of glass. At the same time, PrinterLogic shrinks your print infrastructure footprint to almost zero.

 

Harden print security and trim print waste simultaneously

Curbing waste doesn’t just have to result from cost-cutting initiatives. Functions like pull printing and secure release printing have a twofold benefit of increasing the security of your print environment while keeping unwanted print jobs under control.

How exactly do they do that? Well, take PrinterLogic’s secure release printing as an example. With this feature, users have to authenticate before their print job is actually executed. That prevents printed documents—especially sensitive ones—from being forgotten or abandoned in the output tray. Which reduces costs as well as corporate risk.

And because it eliminates print servers from corporate printing, PrinterLogic also reduces the attack surface of your organization.

 

Print management tips to limit careless printing

When trying to steer employees away from bad printing habits, an important thing to remember is that you’ll achieve more by working with them, not against them. Here are some useful tips along those lines:

• Automatically revert to black-and-white after each print job. After implementing PrinterLogic as its print solution, the law firm Fennemore Craig, P.C. used this method to cut color printing by 85%.
• Use pull or secure release printing. The Fulton County School System found that this actually had a triple benefit. Pull printing didn’t just curtail abandoned print jobs and add security. Employees also found it to be more convenient.
• Find a print solution that empowers end users. PrinterLogic offers a self-service printer installation portal that lets employees safely identify and install printers on their own. Centria discovered that the portal reduced misdirected printouts as well as helpdesk calls.

Monitor print activity through oversight and regular auditing. PrinterLogic’s centralized print management and advanced reporting makes this easy for any IT department.