PrinterLogic Insights is a free SaaS product for small businesses that offers the same advanced reporting and monitoring capabilities that are included in our full PrinterLogic SaaS solution. Insights works with Windows, Mac and Linux workstations and tracks up to 10 network printers.

PrinterLogic Insights tracks printer usage at the user or device level with an eye toward reducing costs and curbing wasteful behavior. SNMP monitoring and alerts allow IT teams to proactively resolve problems before they impact user productivity.

Insights reports on printing, copying, and scanning activity, including metadata attributes such as page count, black and white versus color printing, duplex printing, and estimated costs.

SNMP printer monitoring helps avoid outages
One of the proactive benefits of PrinterLogic Insights is its ability to provide advance alerts about printer issues. If an outage is about to occur for some reason, such as empty toner or paper, Insights can warn admins beforehand. By addressing issues proactively, customers can avoid printer downtime and lost productivity.

While PrinterLogic Insights is limited to 10 networked printers, it offers unique visibility into an unlimited number of USB-connected printers as well. And, there’s no limitation on the number of business locations that Insights will work with.

All of this makes PrinterLogic Insights ideal for small- to medium-sized businesses as well as managed service providers (MSPs) who serve one or more SMB accounts. Small businesses can keep their print environment humming along with even more efficiency. MSPs, meanwhile, can provide even better multi-tenant customer service to a wider range of SMB clients. MSPs who manage print services for their clients can use Insights to help identify printer-consolidation strategies that save money.

What are the advantages of Insights?
PrinterLogic Insights makes it easy to get a handle on printing behaviors and costs. It also helps IT admins be more proactive when it comes to avoiding printer downtime, which stagnates employee productivity. This video is an excellent overview of how it works.

• Visibility down to the user and device level: In a single web console, IT has a clear view of the entire print environment. They can see what’s being printed and who’s printing it, for any printer brand. This even includes USB-connected printers which are expensive to operate and often fly below the radar.
• Higher print availability: When a printer suddenly goes offline, or is about to run out of toner or paper, it’s a support call waiting to happen. Those calls, and the downtime associated with the loss in productivity for employees, are expensive. Convenient SNMP alerting through PrinterLogic Insights helps MSPs and IT admins be more proactive.
• Quick to implement: As part of our PrinterLogic SaaS platform, Insights is easy and quick to implement. Getting started is just a matter of filling out a form, and then installing a small piece of software (called a client), on each workstation. The clients check in with the Insights instance and send the printer list for each workstation up the line. Data starts flowing, and IT Admins have access to reporting and monitoring within minutes.
• Easy to use: PrinterLogic Insights is managed through an intuitive web-based console. It doesn’t take an IT expert to use its reporting capabilities and begin to see wasteful patterns.
• Keeps on working and even gets better: PrinterLogic Insights is not trial software; it is free for as long as a business wants to use it. And, because it’s a SaaS product, any improvements and new functionality are updated automatically, behind the scenes.
• Upgrades are easy: PrinterLogic Insights is based on the same SaaS platform as our full-featured product. In fact, the Insights admin console shows a sneak preview of PrinterLogic’s entire product. Turning on more features is fast because it’s just a matter of licensing.

Get started today
PrinterLogic Insights is available now for businesses that want to get a clear view into their printing activity and begin monitoring printer health. To begin, go to PrinterLogic Insights here.

MSPs can create an instance using our pre-populated Insights folder in the MSP Portal.

If you want to check out our complete solution, you can begin using PrinterLogic SaaS now. Sign up today for a free, 30-day trial. You’ll see how easy it is to eliminate all print servers and convert your printers to an efficient, trouble-free centrally managed direct IP environment.

Following our recent introduction of the PrinterLogic Canon Control Panel Application, we’re pleased to announce our new Sharp Control Panel Application (CPA) for use with our serverless printing infrastructure platform.

The new Sharp CPA will allow your end users to authenticate and release their print jobs on the latest Sharp multifunction printers (MFPs) with incredible ease.

This is the first printer-console application PrinterLogic has offered for Sharp printers, and it’s the second in a series of Gen 2 CPAs based on our new Control Panel Platform. The new apps are more responsive and offer users a more intuitive and consistent experience across printer brands.

What exactly does PrinterLogic’s Sharp CPA do?
The Sharp CPA gives PrinterLogic SaaS customers with Sharp MFPs maximum flexibility when it comes to releasing secure print jobs that are held on the user’s workstation. This type of printing ensures that the output gets in the right hands and isn’t compromised.

The app is installed on the printer’s control panel by an IT admin via PrinterLogic’s management console. End users see the CPA as a PrinterLogic icon on the printer’s touchscreen.

Figure 1. Tapping the PrinterLogic icon on the Sharp control panel launches the CPA.

PrinterLogic’s CPA then becomes the primary interface for users who need to prove their identity in order to receive secure print jobs. Once they swipe their badge or enter their credentials, a list of their print jobs appears on the screen. They can then simply tap to print one, several or all of their print jobs. Or they can delete the ones they no longer want.

Figure 2. Selecting any or all of your held print job(s) is easy with the CPA’s intuitive interface.

Through PrinterLogic’s growing suite of Gen 2 CPAs and the robust secure release printing capabilities of our solution, organizations can safeguard confidential documents and easily retrieve them.

And, since it’s estimated that 20 percent of print jobs get abandoned or turn out to be unimportant, it also helps cut waste and saves on consumables.

Single sign-on delivers even more user convenience.
The new CPA also offers single sign-on (SSO) functionality, which, when configured, saves users time. SSO refers to the ability to authenticate identity once, and then use other apps on a device without having to log in again. For example, on a printer with SSO support the new CPA allows a user to authenticate for secure printing, and then move on to do other work on the MFP (scanning, copying, etc) without more log-ins. The CPA can also function as an SSO “listener,” in which case a user can release a print job without authenticating if they have already signed in on the same console.

Lab tested, Sharp approved.
PrinterLogic’s Sharp CPA works with more than 50 models from Sharp’s current lineup. All of these MFPs meet Sharp’s Open Systems Architecture (OSA) 5.x software standard. A full list is available here.

The new CPA is in late preview mode, appears as a supported MFP option in our SaaS console, and is undergoing final lab testing and verification by Sharp now. PrinterLogic SaaS customers can use the Sharp CPA at no extra charge because it’s part of the secure-release printing functionality that’s already included for free.

Dual-factor authentication and copy/scan tracking
Along with the PrinterLogic Sharp CPA, there are two additional new features. The first is part of the CPA’s functionality. The second is being made available in parallel, so we’ll discuss it here.

The first is dual-factor authentication. This is an added level of verification that’s becoming increasingly common in fields like government, finance, healthcare and legal—anywhere, really, that sensitive information carries added risk. Releasing print jobs when the CPA is configured this way requires users to swipe their ID badge and enter a PIN to authenticate.

Another new feature is copy/scan tracking. A small app is installed on the MFP (facilitated by checking a box in our admin console) that tracks copies and scans at the user level. The information is sent to PrinterLogic’s database and is accessible from within our advanced reporting tools. When copy/scan tracking is enabled, PrinterLogic’s reports show print, copy and scan counts and estimated costs; they can even be e-mailed automatically to decision-makers to help inform cost-saving initiatives.

Copy/scan tracking is available now on HP, Xerox, Konica-Minolta and Sharp MFPs.

Coming attractions.
The PrinterLogic Sharp CPA is only the latest addition to our suite of Gen 2 CPAs. Canon was announced in late July. In the coming months, you can look forward to new CPAs for Xerox, HP, Ricoh and Konica-Minolta printers. By early 2020, our Gen 2 CPA support will include eight major printer manufacturers, which means our SaaS solution will have full secure-release printing functionality for 90% of the printer brands in use.

The new CPA is available now for PrinterLogic SaaS customers. PrinterLogic Web Stack customers can expect integration of the new CPA later this year. Web Stack customers need a pull-printing license in order to access the functionality.

As great as our new CPAs are, they’re just one of the many perks of our serverless printing infrastructure. If you’re not already a PrinterLogic customer, schedule a demo today and try our solution in your own print environment free of charge for 30 days.

PrinterLogic is excited to announce a new dedicated Control Panel Application (CPA) for Canon’s imageRUNNER ADVANCE series of MFPs. Once installed and launched, the app appears on a printer’s embedded touchscreen so you can manage and securely release print jobs held on a workstation for authentication.

Why is this something to get excited about? For starters, the Canon CPA is our first app based on an all-new Control Panel Platform, which employs a common code base that will facilitate rapid development of other cloud-compatible Gen 2 CPAs now underway. The new apps provide equivalent functionality on both our on-prem and SaaS platforms.

Benefits of the Gen 2 architecture include a more streamlined user experience, a faster, more responsive console, improved printing speed, better CPA management tools for IT admins, and a uniform user interface across a mix of printers. The new generation of CPAs will look and behave the same no matter what printer brand you’re using.

Our new Gen 2 CPA for Canon. View all your secure print jobs and easily select only those you want to print. Even delete jobs you no longer care about.

A first for the Canon partnership. A better solution for secure printing.
This is our first Control Panel Application for Canon, which ranks among the world’s leading printer manufacturers. The CPA is “Canon-certified,” which means it has undergone stringent testing in Canon’s labs and meets all functionality and compatibility standards for the imageRUNNER ADVANCE family of devices.

The new app provides a better secure-printing experience for end users and admins alike. It’s more responsive and has a cleaner, more intuitive interface. Users will enjoy faster print speeds—up to five to ten times faster than with our previous CPAs. And anything that speeds up printing is good news for everyone.

The new CPA also supports time-saving, hassle-free Single Sign-on (SSO) protocols. On printer models with native SSO functionality, you authenticate one time to access any printer app or function. Or, if you’ve already authenticated on the printer, our Gen 2 CPA has a “listener” mode to bypass the login step when it’s time to release a held document.

Maintaining the PrinterLogic advantage for secure printing.
What the new console software doesn’t change is an easy to use, secure pull-printing process that many PrinterLogic users are already familiar with.

PrinterLogic eliminates troublesome print servers, which are vulnerable to attack and put your confidential data at risk. Instead, we use a centrally managed direct IP infrastructure that’s efficient and secure. Here’s how it works:

First, you print from your workstation as usual. The print job (and your confidential data) is held securely on the workstation until it’s called for. Thanks to our serverless printing infrastructure, your docs don’t go anywhere until you are standing at the printer and swipe your badge.

At the printer, once your swipe your badge or login, all of your held print jobs instantly appear on the printer’s screen. You simply pick the job or jobs you want to print on the touchscreen panel, press print, and within seconds, your docs appear in the printer tray. You can even use the console to delete jobs you no longer care about.

All of which ensures that confidential documents get into the right hands, and aren’t left sitting on a printer tray to tempt prying eyes. What’s more, secure release printing does away with abandoned print jobs and reduces wasted, costly consumables.

What’s next?
Our new Control Panel Application debuts this week on PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud). For more details, view the FAQ. Additional Gen 2 apps for more brands will be released over the remainder of 2019, starting with our new Sharp CPA later next month.

Three more cloud-compatible Gen 2 CPAs will be released this year, and the complete suite will be available by early 2020. At that point, PrinterLogic’s on-prem and SaaS customers can take advantage of secure release pull printing across eight major MFP manufacturers: HP, Canon, Xerox, Konica-Minolta, Ricoh, Sharp, Toshiba and Lexmark/Dell.

If you’re already a PrinterLogic SaaS customer, all you have to do is sit tight. You’ll get access to these new CPAs automatically. If you use PrinterLogic Web Stack (formerly Printer Installer), the new Canon CPA will be part of our 19.1 release, expected to be available within a few weeks.

If you’re not yet a customer but are interested in seeing firsthand how pull printing and secure release printing work in PrinterLogic, be sure to sign up today for a free 30-day demo of our on-premises software. Or test drive our SaaS solution, PrinterLogic SaaS, for the same amount of time.

Of all the challenges caused by enterprise printing (and there are many), healthcare organizations face some of the toughest. Their work environments are almost always dynamic, with medical staff moving from one facility to another or working in shifts that are anything but 9 to 5. They also tend to be highly distributed, geographically scattered across hospitals, clinics and administrative offices with multiple departments. What’s more, their IT infrastructure typically incorporates an EMR solution with unique workflows.

None of these aspects lends itself to easy, straightforward printing and print management.

And that’s not even the half of it. On top of all these moving parts is a fundamental need for security—usually in the form of secure release printing—to maintain the privacy of patient records and protect the confidentiality of sensitive information.

Bearing that in mind, the ideal enterprise printing solution for most healthcare organizations would look something like this:

• Easy to administer: No matter how distributed the organization, centralized print management would enable admins to move, add, edit and delete printers or drivers quickly and intuitively, and all via a single pane of glass.
• Consistent and convenient for end users: Mirroring the ease of administration, all end users regardless of their role would be able to print where and when they need to with minimal—or even zero—effort. This would naturally call for seamless integration with any EMR or VDI solution present in the environment.
• Cost effective: As in any industry, healthcare organizations are under constant pressure to reduce costs where possible. The ideal enterprise printing solution would enable this through powerful yet user-friendly features to curb the usage of consumables and optimize the printer fleet.
• Secure and HIPAA compliant: With strict state and federal regulations governing the disclosure of patient information, it’s becoming almost essential to have secure release printing functionality—especially one that stands a good chance of being readily adopted by end users and won’t impede their productivity.

That might seem simple enough. But given the limitations of traditional server-based printing, it makes for a pretty tall order. No wonder healthcare organizations find it so hard to identify enterprise printing solutions that can measure up to these demands.

Before calling off the search, there’s one next-generation enterprise printing solution your healthcare organization should investigate further: PrinterLogic. Not only does it offer secure release printing, it also features a serverless printing infrastructure that’s capable of meeting all the additional criteria above.

Secure release printing with PrinterLogic
For those unfamiliar with secure release printing, you can think of it as a close cousin to pull printing.

Just like pull printing, secure release printing divides the customary printing procedure into two steps. First comes the initiating step, which amounts to clicking “Print” as you normally would. At this point, the print job is held instead of being printed automatically. Then comes the execution step—that is, issuing the command for your desired printer to carry out the print job. With secure release printing, users are required to verify themselves before this command can be issued. With PrinterLogic, authorization is quick and easy; it can take place through a badge/card reader, a PIN or even a smartphone app.

This makes printing more intentional while also giving end users more control over how sensitive print jobs are handled. Whereas standard print jobs would ordinarily be printed out immediately on a default printer, PrinterLogic’s secure release printing allows users to specify a destination printer and helps prevent sensitive print jobs from sitting in the output tray while waiting to be picked up. Confidential documents remain confidential.

In cases where PrinterLogic is able to eliminate print servers completely (some EMR solutions require them), its serverless printing infrastructure is able to enhance print security even further. By holding print jobs on the initiating workstation and not a shared print queue prior to the authorization step, it gets rid of the single attack vector from which server-based print jobs are vulnerable. A malicious actor would potentially have to target dozens of individual workstations at the right time to have access to the same data.

PrinterLogic brings even more benefits to healthcare printing
Along with secure release printing and a next-generation serverless printing infrastructure, PrinterLogic offers features like centralized print management, which gives admins comprehensive access to and control over the entire print environment. Drivers can be managed in PrinterLogic’s common repository, and printer settings and profiles can be adjusted individually or en masse using the intuitive GUI.

For end users, PrinterLogic provides a self-service printer-installation portal that can be used to complement its advanced automated deployment capabilities. This web-based portal allows end users to see available nearby printers and install them with a single click—ideal for nurses and other medical staff who move between stations or facilities.

Healthcare organizations and related service providers have left conventional enterprise printing solutions behind and implemented PrinterLogic to reap manifold benefits like these. EPIC Management is just one example (read the case study here). This California-based healthcare management and consulting services company successfully deployed PrinterLogic to gain visibility into its multi-site print environment, vastly simplify print management despite using a range of Windows and Citrix software, and roll out secure release printing to its customers.

PrinterLogic’s serverless printing infrastructure can do the same for your healthcare print environment. By taking a few seconds to sign up today, you can test drive our solution—including features like secure release printing and centralized print management—free of charge 30 days.

The release of version 18.3 marks the arrival of many highly anticipated features in PrinterLogic’s enterprise print-management software. Several new features augment the company’s serverless infrastructure with direct and dramatic improvements to secure printing, making PrinterLogic’s next-generation solution as hardened in terms of security as it is flexible in implementation.

Printer-agnostic CAC/PIV authentication
Employees of U.S. federal agencies are issued smart cards as an authentication mechanism. In the Department of Defense (DoD), these are referred to as Common Access Cards (CAC). In other agencies they are called Personal Identity Verification (PIV) cards. Among other purposes, these smart cards are used to securely release print jobs that are being held until the employee is at the printer, ready to receive them.

The primary advantages of PrinterLogic’s optional CAC/PIV solution is that it is serverless and printer agnostic, which means it works without traditional print server infrastructure, and that the PrinterLogic card reader can be used with any printing device, regardless of its make or model. This enables departments or whole agencies to implement secure CAC/PIV print release across their entire printer fleet without having to replace any printers.

As described in our white paper on print security in government agencies, print servers are single points of vulnerability that create attractive attack vectors for malicious actors. PrinterLogic’s serverless infrastructure eliminates the risks associated with print servers and provides a framework for end-to-end print security. In addition, CAC/PIV smart cards are more secure than most civilian employee badges because they require both a swipe and a PIN to complete the authentication.

Even though this degree of print security involves complex technology, the new PrinterLogic feature is easy to use. First, the user logs in using their CAC/PIV reader at their workstation as usual. PrinterLogic Web Stack (formerly Printer Installer) automatically provides a digital signature for print jobs using this authentication process. When the user prints a document, they are prompted to enter their PIN. This creates the signature. The user then goes to the printer and securely releases the job using their CAC/PIV card with a compatible reader.

FIPS 140-2 US government security certification
The cryptographic modules in version 18.3 of PrinterLogic’s software have been hardened to ensure compliance with the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Publication 140-2. As part of the company’s FIPS certification, the 18.3 release is currently undergoing an evaluation by the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP), using the U.S. Government Approved Protection Profile. Final verification testing is underway now, and certification is expected by April, 2019.

Together with CAC/PIV support, FIPS 140-2 certification ensures that PrinterLogic Web Stack is now the ideal print-management solution for use in federal print environments—or indeed any organization that values uncompromising print security.

Canon control panel application (CPA) support (beta)
Currently in beta testing, PrinterLogic’s Canon CPA support for version 18.3 will allow customers with Canon printers to use PrinterLogic’s print-management solution for secure pull printing on those devices. Via the CPA, users can enter a username/password or PIN/ID combination on the printer’s embedded control panel to authenticate themselves and securely release held print jobs.

This also marks the launch of PrinterLogic’s brand-new common CPA platform, which provides a uniform code base for our control panel apps. Along with accelerated speed of development and increased efficiency, the common CPA platform will provide customers with a consistent user experience across printers, faster CPA responsiveness, improved error-handling and added print security.

Public key infrastructure (PKI) encryption for email printing
As part of their security protocols, many enterprise organizations require emails sent from Microsoft Outlook to be encrypted. But that encryption can also prevent those emails from printing correctly. The 18.3 release remedies this with native support for PKI encryption.

When this feature is enabled, encrypted e-mails can be automatically decrypted for printing as long as the administrator has added a valid PKI certificate and key in the PrinterLogic management console.

Faster, more resilient mobile printing
Version 18.3 of PrinterLogic’s software has added “fast lane” technology to its mobile printing system that ensures the highest possible throughput for smartphone, tablet and Chromebook printing. Each mobile print job is assigned its own unique thread so if a previous job in the queue stalls out, the software parallel-processes the jobs and keeps things moving. As a result, mobile users, particularly in large organizations, will enjoy improved print performance.

Smartphone apps for pull-print authentication with PrinterLogic SaaS (beta)
For organizations that want to roll out secure pull printing without having to invest in a badge-release system—or having to invest in expensive control-panel printers—PrinterLogic will offer companion iPhone (iOS) and Android smartphone apps for its PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud) customers with a pull-print license.

Currently, users who want to authenticate a pull-print job on a smartphone use PrinterLogic’s web-based release portal on their mobile browser. Now, mobile users can simply launch a dedicated app on their device. Their credentials are set once and securely stored within the app, which means they’ll be taken right to their held print jobs the moment they tap on it. From there they can easily release jobs to a desired printer.

Not only does this new feature eliminate the need to purchase expensive badging hardware, it also promotes the use of secure printing by virtue of its convenience. In addition, because the apps work with less expensive network printers that are not equipped with control panels, they make streamlined secure/pull printing practical without having to spend money on new print infrastructure.

Additional features and improvements in version 18.3

• SNMP alerting enhancements: Customers can now manage alerting and monitoring capabilities via PrinterLogic’s common Service Client as opposed to managing SNMP traffic from individual endpoints. PrinterLogic SaaS customers will be able to manage SNMP alerts locally from behind the firewall. This helps mitigate WAN traffic constraints.
• Support for MySQL 8: PrinterLogic Web Stack previously supported MySQL 5.5, which recently entered its end-of-life phase. MySQL 8 is the latest version with planned support through 2026.

Availability
In addition to the new functionality in PrinterLogic Web Stack 18.3, here’s a summary of expected timing for other releases or formal certifications discussed in this blog:

• PrinterLogic Web Stack 18.3: PrinterLogic’s on-prem solution is available now.
• PrinterLogic SaaS 18.3: A SaaS release that includes most of these features will be available late Q1.
• Smartphone apps for iOS/Android: These apps are expected to be available from their respective mobile app stores by late Q1. They work with the current version of PrinterLogic SaaS, providing the customer has a pull-print license. They are not hinged to 18.3.
• Canon CPA support: The new CPA is undergoing testing and certification by Canon, and we expect a final version to be released by late Q1 or early Q2.
• NIAP certification: PrinterLogic’s application to the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) is now under review. Certification is expected by April, 2019.

Existing customers can download PrinterLogic Web Stack 18.3 from the Product Updates and Release Notes page in the documentation portal. Existing customers who wish to be part of the beta test program for the Canon CPA or the new smartphone apps should contact their sales representative or product support.

If you aren’t yet a customer but would like to test the latest version of PrinterLogic Web Stack free of charge, sign up today for a 30-day trial and experience the benefits of centrally managed direct-IP printing for yourself.

Print-management strategies range from traditional in-house solutions to outsourced managed services. We’ll examine some of the most significant benefits—including those offered by PrinterLogic’s print-management software—that can benefit your organization.

1. Eliminating or minimizing infrastructure
Traditional print-management solutions give you a limited choice: Distribute your print network across multiple print servers, or consolidate your infrastructure with a centralized print server. The former requires more hardware, oversight and maintenance. The latter creates a centralized point of failure that drives up the costs of redundancy and can jeopardize printing across an entire organization.

Both methods can place unnecessary burdens on WAN connections. An alternative is TCP/IP printer deployments, but conventional direct-IP environments are impossible to manage centrally.

PrinterLogic’s unique blend of reliable direct-IP printing with powerful centralized management scales to suit organizations of any size. Our print-management software can support an entire printer fleet—even in distributed environments—using minimal infrastructure and without the drawbacks of traditional print-management solutions. Even if a host server fails, PrinterLogic’s direct-IP backbone allows printing to continue as normal with no loss of core functionality. Incredibly, the same applies to our zero-footprint cloud solution, PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud).

2. Reducing print consumables costs
Consumables like toner and paper account for up to 20% of most printing budgets. Sometimes called “invisible costs,” consumables tend to be automatically restocked by support staff as needed. This means there’s very little incentive to curb unnecessary printing. Users rarely understand the full cost of printing a 30-page report, and can think nothing of printing a draft, making two or three changes, and printing the entire doc again.

But how can end users be made more aware of consumable overuse? How can departments gather data to monitor their consumption and incentivize resource conservation?

Traditional print servers make routine reporting complicated. Without supplemental software, print servers don’t offer detailed reporting on consumables usage. Companies that offer managed print services do monitor consumable usage, but this reporting is often wrapped up in more comprehensive contracts. Specialized data-gathering services are expensive, and that can offset potential cost savings.

Through built-in print auditing and reporting, PrinterLogic and its SaaS print-management software counterpart, PrinterLogic SaaS, offer real-time visibility into consumable usage for individual devices or whole printer fleets. This information can be automatically emailed to department heads, managers, or other decision-makers on a periodic basis. Your organization can use this shared data as a basis for efficiency initiatives and hardware fleet optimization.

3. Increasing productivity for IT staff and users
Printing downtime and interrupted print jobs set off a cascade of inefficiency, affecting end users, help-desk staff, and admins alike. Print servers consume a big percentage of IT’s time, and until the crises are over, these resources can’t be directed elsewhere. Managed print services may be able to handle these problems, but they’re not immune to downtime either, and they can take longer to respond to printing emergencies than in-house staff.

PrinterLogic is a comprehensive print management solution that integrates seamlessly with virtual environments like Citrix and VMware. The solution helps boost productivity across the print-management spectrum. PrinterLogic provides an intuitive and visual self-service portal that allows end users to identify and install printers with a single click—without help-desk assistance.

Our robust driver-management system sidesteps conflicts and software incompatibilities that can regularly crash print servers.

PrinterLogic solutions have been proven to drastically reduce print-related help-desk calls. Dialysis Clinic, Inc., which saw an estimated 90% reduction in printer-related support tickets after implementing PrinterLogic, is a not uncommon example.

Additional benefits of PrinterLogic
PrinterLogic also offers enhanced functionality with optional Pull Printing and Mobile Printing Modules. These improve consumables costs savings even more, and contribute to your organization’s environmental goals. Full-featured printing for mobile and BYOD users, and secure printing for confidential documents, are among the most sought-after print management capabilities today. Both PrinterLogic SaaS, our SaaS solution, and PrinterLogic’s traditional on-prem edition can add these capabilities.

To experience the many advantages of PrinterLogic’s print management features in your own organization, sign up to demo PrinterLogic for 30 days. It’s free and there are no limitations on features.

For all the benefits of VMware, the shortcomings of things like printer redirection and location-based printing can create a fertile space for problems to arise. If your end users are having trouble printing or a VMware printer is not working like it should, chances are that the problem falls into one of a few categories.

VMware printers are not mapping correctly

VMware printing relies on the View agent and uninterrupted communication between the client and server. Should the View agent be unable to relay information between those two points, you might find that the VMware printer is not mapping properly and that the user is unable to print as a result.

Try reinstalling the VMware View agent. If that doesn’t work, reinstall the View Client on the client workstation. In the event that still doesn’t solve the problem with the VMware printer, try stopping and starting the Thinprint service manually. Things get a bit more complicated after that, including the delicate process of editing Windows registry values. That’s beyond the scope of this brief overview, so you’ll want to consult the VMware printing support documentation for precise step-by-step instructions.

A VMware network printer is not working on reconnect

When printer redirection fails, the symptoms can be anything from corrupted print jobs to printers that appear in a client’s printer list but are inaccessible, all the way to jobs mysteriously vanishing from the print queue. Occasionally, everything will work fine when the user first initiates the session but then the client will be unable to map the VMware printer when the user reconnects.

There are known bugs in several VMware versions than can cause this problem, particularly when connecting over PCoIP. There are three possible solutions:

• Change the default connection protocol to the VMWare Blast protocol.
• Downgrade or upgrade to a VMware version (either a point release or full version) that is known to fix this VMware printing issue.
• Use RDP instead of PCoIP to connect from the View Client to the desktop VM.

Errors using location-based VMware printing

If your users are experiencing VMware printer errors with location-based printing, there could be an issue with your GPO settings. Group policy is notoriously difficult to troubleshoot because it’s a chain of contingencies that is unique to each organization. There could also be a problem with the location-based printing GPO .DLL file, which will result in an admin not being able to see the location-based printing settings in the Group Policy Editor and a VMware printer (or printers) not deploying correctly to end users.

The most common cause of this is a 32-bit GPO .DLL file on a 64-bit server. The fix is simple—just replace it with the 64-bit .DLL file. What makes it a little tricky is that both the 32- and 64-bit location-based printing GPO .DLL files share the same name.

Solving VMware printing problems with PrinterLogic

Instead of tediously troubleshooting every last obscure setting when you have a VMware network printer that’s not working, why not take the proactive approach and implement PrinterLogic’s next-generation print management solution? It integrates seamlessly with VMware environments to enhance your print experience on both the front- and backend. That means effortless location-based printing (without GPOs!), speedier logons, reduced WAN traffic, powerful centralized print management, intuitive self-service printer installation for your end users and much, much more. It’s the most robust, cost-effective way to take the complexity and uncertainty out of VMware printing and retake control of VMware print management.

Beginning with Windows Server 2012, Microsoft introduced a feature called Branch Office Direct Printing for clients running Windows 8 or higher. This was done in response to longstanding problems with print servers, especially in geographically distributed environments with a consolidated infrastructure. In these scenarios, print jobs would be routed from the client workstation to the central print server (usually at the organization’s headquarters), then back to the local printer. All via the WAN connection.

Branch office printing was meant to limit these trips across the WAN, which would reduce the heavy network traffic caused by print jobs. By keeping print activity within the physical walls of the branch office, WAN bottlenecking along with the inevitable exposure to WAN vulnerabilities (for example, WAN interruptions preventing printing) would be diminished or even eliminated outright.

What’s Unique about Branch Office Printing?
Branch Office Direct Printing in Server 2016 and earlier makes use of direct IP connections. These are one-to-one connections between the client device and the network printer. Instead of printing to a shared queue, users instead print to their local printer along the straightest and most efficient network route. Direct IP printing also limits print activity to a per-user basis, which avoids the common problems of a shared spooler, like a flaky driver or a rogue print job crashing the spooler and stopping printing for the entire user pool. Branch office printing via direct IP printing is therefore robust and has a minimal network footprint.

However, some serious limitations remain with Branch Office Direct Printing in Server 2016. Its scalability is severely limited, users cannot easily install their own printers, it’s compatible only with certain versions of Windows, and features like logging and quotas are lost.

Why Is Branch Office Direct Printing Not Working for Me?
Now that we’ve briefly recapped why branch office printing exists and how it works, let’s move to the fun part: troubleshooting! As straightforward as direct IP printing is, there are a few possible reasons why Branch Office Direct Printing might not be working for you.

If you’ve locked the printer to accept jobs from a specific IP address for security reasons, branch office printing could fail. Printers must be configured to accept jobs from any IP address.

The problems that are typically associated with group policy printer deployments and scripting also apply to Branch Office Direct Printing in Server 2016. If you’re seeing users suffering from prolonged login processes or failed deployments, you might need to reexamine your group policy settings rather than spend time concentrating specifically on the branch office printing feature.

Some users have reported problems with Branch Office Direct Printing not working because of automatic fallbacks to server-side rendering (SSR) instead of client-side rendering (CSR). An improper printer deployment or network error can cause clients to revert to SSR when they shouldn’t.

How Can I Implement Branch Office Direct Printing without the Downsides?
Thanks to PrinterLogic, you can experience all the benefits of branch office printing—reduced WAN traffic, high availability—with none of the drawbacks. Our next-generation print management solution allows you to enjoy the simplicity and robustness of direct IP printing in any environment, including Citrix and VMware, while providing powerful centralized management, self-service installation and detailed reporting—not to mention access to advanced features like BYOD and guest printing and Pull Printing. Plus there’s no more struggling with GPOs or scripts. It’s how branch office printing was meant to be.