Posted by Jordan Lindsey

Managing printers in Citrix can be a big problem for many administrators because of the uncertainty on how to manage the printer objects and printer drivers in each location. Citrix users frequently deal with uncertainty on whether to put the printer objects and printer drivers on the Citrix server, in the Citrix OS, or on the end point and redirect. This inevitably leads to frustration at how the Citrix Universal driver doesn’t always work. There are many limitations on driver profile capabilities to support hole punching, duplex, color controls, secure printing, lack of reporting, and self service printer installation capability. Scripting and using GPOs is difficult to manage and causes delays during the login process for users. There’s also the question of transitioning from fat clients to zero clients and a need to support both scenarios. How can you solve all of these issues?

Luckily, PrinterLogic is here to help with Citrix printing. Let me explain how the solution works.

PrinterLogic converts your print server environment and/or direct IP environment into a centrally managed direct IP environment with a single on-premise web-based administration console. PrinterLogic runs as an agent on the end user’s workstations (where applicable), with Citrix OS published for the desktops and on the Citrix server publishing the applications.

PrinterLogic can deploy and setup printers in a few different ways. For your end users, they simply go to a web page, view a floor plan map with all their nearby printers, and click on the nearest printer to install it on their own, no matter what their permissions are. That’s right, a guest, generic account, kiosk, etc. can all install any printer they have access to, without ever having to contact IT.

PrinterLogic can also handle printer installation through automation. Any printer can be installed for end users by any of the following means; Active Directory User, Computer, Group, Container and OU, IP address Range, Hostname and MAC Address. All these deployments options are based upon the physical endpoint device whether it is a Fat, Thin or Zero client. So if you want a printer installed on a published desktop or published application, we detect all the endpoint information and create and present the printers based upon the physical device and location of the user.

We also hear from many customers who use GPOs, and most complain that it is a slow login process for the users. That’s not a problem for PrinterLogic. The client runs as a system service, so we do not use GPO or scripting, and log offs and reboots are not required. If a user disconnects his or her Citrix session and then reconnects somewhere else, the PrinterLogic client detects that change and automatically display the new printers in the desktop or application the user is viewing.

You might think this is all too good to be true, but that’s exactly why we offer you a free 30-day Proof of Concept where one of the PrinterLogic system engineers will install it and enable you to see for yourself how PrinterLogic works in your own environment. Do not continue to let Citrix printer management be a headache to manage. Contact us for a demo or a free 30-day trial.

Posted by Devin Anderson

When you’ve spent any amount of time in a particular line of work, you pick up the lingo. You start using words or phrases that are shorthand for a whole host of ideas. Eventually those words or phrases become so commonplace that you can’t recall a time when you didn’t know them—but to the layperson’s ear, they might as well be Greek.

Take a phrase like enterprise print management solutions. It’s one we use often on this blog and in our press materials, because that’s exactly what PrinterLogic is in a nutshell. But what exactly do we mean when we talk about PrinterLogic as an enterprise print management solution? And how does it differ from traditional print management solutions?

Traditional print management solutions are best exemplified by print servers. These are hardware devices designed with the sole purpose of connecting client computers to printers over a network, functioning as intermediaries between the “Print” button on your screen and the device that prints out the physical documents. They have more or less been the standard for years.

As with any standard, however, there comes a time when their utility should be questioned. For the same reasons we no longer listen to music on wax cylinders or make our daily commute on horseback, print servers are looking more and more anachronistic. They entail high upfront and replacement costs, require a great deal of maintenance, and can be finicky (to say the least) in daily use.

Back when print servers were the only method of dealing with networked printing environments, they made sense despite their inherent drawbacks. But the size and geographic distribution of modern workplaces have pushed print servers to their usable limits, and what’s more, print servers have been superseded by more flexible, more robust technology—what we call enterprise print management solutions. Namely, PrinterLogic. And we’ve made it something of a mission to show companies of all sizes how easy it is to eliminate print servers forever.

By eliminating print servers and deploying PrinterLogic, you actually retain all the functionality of a traditional print management solution while introducing all the benefits of an enterprise print management solution. For example, you can still print to any networked printer. Only now you can print from end-point devices to the printers themselves, which does away with heavy WAN traffic. That reduces congestion across the entire network and speeds up print times.

Centralization is another huge bonus. With PrinterLogic, you can manage every single printer in the company from a single terminal. That allows you to batch or selectively update drivers with a single click, easily set default printers, or auto-deploy printers without having to use group policy objects, scripts or print servers. Centralization also means consistency. The management interface and processes are the same throughout the entire organization.

That also holds true for end users, not just admins. PrinterLogic empowers your employees with consistent self-service options, so users with everyday computer skills can install printers with just a click. Mobile employees can also print natively from any tablet, smartphone or netbook with a browser—yet PrinterLogic actually enhances that convenience by allowing you to double down on security with granular authorization and pull printing.

Combined with seamless integration into Citrix environments and powerful auditing options, that all adds up to a drastic reduction in WAN traffic, support desk calls, time spent on troubleshooting, and consumables usage. Which translates to huge savings in both the short and long term.

Now that we’ve highlighted just a few advantages of PrinterLogic as an enterprise print management solution, is it any wonder why we consider print servers to be a museum piece?

Posted by Andrew Miller

We end up speaking to a lot of people at trade shows, and one comment we frequently hear runs something like this: “We would love to eliminate print servers in our organization, but we have too many remote offices. We’re too distributed to look for a simpler solution.”

Then we get to experience the fun of seeing the delight on their faces when we demonstrate PrinterLogic, and show them that the opposite is true. Any organization, no matter how distributed, has the ability to drastically reduce its remote server infrastructure by implementing PrinterLogic printer management software. And organizations that are highly distributed might even stand to benefit the most from migrating to PrinterLogic on account of increased sources of ROI.

To put it another way: Eliminating print servers with PrinterLogic is not only possible, it can be profitable.

Take CFCU Community Credit Union, for example. They’re one of the largest credit unions in New York State. After dealing with 2-3 print server failures per week that would effectively bring down their entire enterprise print environment, CFCU was determined to eliminate all four of their print servers (two Citrix and two local) across ten offices.

Once they adopted PrinterLogic as their print management solution, they were able to eliminate print servers altogether—plus all the productivity-sapping downtime those servers caused. And CFCU got some nice perks to boot, like a simplified end-user experience and the joy of never having to troubleshoot or upgrade a print server again.

CFCU Community Credit Union isn’t alone. A recent survey by TechValidate of PrinterLogic’s enterprise customers revealed that nearly a quarter of our customers, like CFCU, were able to eliminate between 90% and 100% of their print servers. Almost half of our customers were able to reduce remote print servers by over 70%. 61% were able to reduce their remote server infrastructure by more than 50%.

If you’re interested in learning more about how companies like CFCU Community Credit Union are eliminating the cost and headaches of print servers enterprise-wide, take a look at some of our other case studies of major companies who have completely eliminated their print servers in various distributed environments:

• 
  APi Group, Inc.
  
  is in the process of eliminating all 160 of its print servers across as many global sites.
• The Belgian company
  
  Aquafin
  
  used PrinterLogic to eliminate four print servers across 100 locations.
• 
  Zeus Industrial Products
  
  was able to eliminate the print servers in all four of its North American facilities, which include more than 1,600 users and 500 printers.

Posted by Steve Kelley

Solving iOS printing without an MDM
As IT professionals, it is inevitable we face the need to support iOS devices for printing. As of 2014, over 800 million iOS devices were in the market [1]. So, if your corporation is like PrinterLogic or the 1,500 plus customers we support with tight BYOD policies and traveling sales staff needing fast and convenient printing, iOS printing is likely a hot topic. There are a few officially licensed AirPlay printers available, but what about all those fancy Multi Function Printers (MFPs) that took a chunk of your budget last year? Let’s take a look at how PrinterLogic helps you securely utilize those printers with iOS devices.

Native iOS Printing
PrinterLogic enables you to integrate native iOS printing from iPhones, iPads, and even iPods into your printing environment. Customers ask me during demonstrations if their iOS devices need to be enrolled in a mobile device management (MDM) tool. MDM is not needed to use PrinterLogic’s awesome native iOS printing capabilities.
With PrinterLogic and our Mobile Printing and BYOD and Guest Printing features, you just create a MobilePrint queue. The next step is to simply add a few DNS entries that we have documented in our User Guide. Now, your MobilePrint Queue will show up on all on-network iOS devices. That is it! No downloading an application on each iOS device, no configuration on your end users part, and no confusion at where your end users should print to. That means less service desk calls and higher internal customer satisfaction.

All you need is one easy-to-use PrinterLogic native iOS print queue on all of your iOS devices. On top of that your users can send those mobile print jobs to any printer in your environment! No need to buy new printers, no MDM, and no integration headache.

End Users Experience
Now that end users have the mobile print queue available on all their iOS devices, how do they get print jobs from their device to the printers? From their iOS device a user selects the MobilePrint queue from within any application. The user then authenticates at a PrinterLogic enabled MFP and the job is pulled down using the printer’s console. PrinterLogic makes authentication simple too. You can use a RFID badge on supported MFPs, a computer browser, or even use the same iOS device to pull the job down to any printer.

Behind the Scenes
For those who want to know all the behind the scenes action, it is quite simple. Your PrinterLogic server is being setup with a MobileQueue that is a virtual AirPlay printer. That queue ends up on all your iOS devices through Apple’s DNS service discovery protocol, NOT BONJOUR MULTICASTING. Bonjour services sometimes get a bad reputation for causing a lot of unnecessary network traffic and issues with cross-network compatibility. However, with PrinterLogic’s iOS printing this is not the case. Because it is only the one virtual AirPlay printer that is using bonjour DNS-discovery service your network engineers will likely embrace this solution. To set up this bonjour service all that is required is four specifically formatted DNS entries. After that your MobilePrint Queue will be available on all your iOS devices. It is important to note that this can also be setup across different VLAN’s as long as IPP port 631 and DNS port 53 are open. So no worries about your segmented WIFI or guest network.

Tracking iOS Printing
You could definitely file this feature under “cost savings”, and this advantage is worthy of a separate highlight. The at-a-glance reporting of PrinterLogic makes it easy to determine which printers are being utilized the most, including which ones are now being used for iOS printing. Data points like date, time, printer, user, computer, color and document name are all readily available, enabling you to track usage throughout your entire organization in an incredibly granular way.

So if you are ready to bring iOS printing to your environment in the most cost-effective way, reach out to us and we’ll be happy to set you up with a live demonstration and even a free Proof of Concept to try out iOS and all our printing features in your environment.

(1) Cook, T. (Director) (2015, June 8). WWDC Keynote. World Wide Developer’s Conference. Lecture conducted from Apple, San Francisco.

Posted by Devin Anderson

By now we’re all aware that the growing mobile workforce is an inexorable trend. And that trend toward mobility and BYOD policies raises problems of interoperability that stem from device heterogeneity. But, as we’ve also seen, PrinterLogic is the enterprise mobile printing solution that effortlessly bridges the gaps between those different devices. If your mobile device has a browser, you can print. Simple as that.

That still leaves one area of massive concern: security. Who can initiate jobs? Who can release them at the physical printer? Which printers are available to which users? Those are all questions that will immediately spring to mind when the topic of mobile print solutions comes up. And PrinterLogic has the answers.

PrinterLogic’s Secure Printing capabilities help lock down your enterprise print environment. A more generic name for Secure Printing is server-less pull printing. What is pull printing? Well, think of a print job as being broken up into two parts. There’s the “push” that comes when the user sends the job to the printer queue. Then there’s the “pull” that comes when the user gives the okay for the printer to actually print the job. It’s designed not to be a fully automated process—it requires the intervention of authorized users to make sure they’re in control every step of the way.

With Secure Printing, users you’ve authorized through services like Active Directory will be allowed to send print jobs to a particular physical printer through a specific printer driver. Once they’ve sent the job, they can pull it down at that physical printer at their discretion. The practical benefit of this pull printing solution is that confidential documents aren’t left sitting in the paper tray for hours for all to see.

By using the printer’s actual driver as the “push” conduit, all original printer functionality is maintained. That way Secure Printing from PrinterLogic retains all the security features of the original driver while keeping you from being tied to any one printer manufacturer. On the “pull” end, any device with a browser—including PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, and almost all mobile devices—can access PrinterLogic’s web-based app in order to release print jobs securely.

Where enterprise security is concerned, sometimes a few extra hoops are necessary for added peace of mind. PrinterLogic gives you the option of implementing extra security features while retaining some level of convenience.

So, for example, you can introduce a badge or card reader as a release mechanism. In this scenario an aftermarket badge reader is either placed at the physical printer or is already built into the printing device. Like a lock and a key, the badge reader integrates with the existing badge system to release the print jobs to the printer associated with the badge.

Another security feature you can implement is printer console release. Here the PrinterLogic app can be installed directly on a printer, enabling users to log in and release their print jobs via the printer’s LCD. This method doesn’t require any additional hardware for supported devices.

Through clever pull printing solutions like these, PrinterLogic brings the incredible flexibility of mobile printing to your company while actually enhancing security.

Posted by Devin Anderson

There’s a clear trend in today’s business climate, and that trend is toward mobility. A recent forecast from the IT analytics firm IDC estimates that the world’s mobile worker population will reach 1.3 billion this year—which amounts to 37.2 percent of the total workforce on our planet.

How mobility is defined will vary from workplace to workplace, but one thing is for sure: IT departments have to respond to the increased demand for offsite and roaming employees—from interns on up to the executive level.

What complicates site flexibility is device flexibility. That is to say, employees don’t just want to work from home or on the go—they also expect a BYOD policy. They want to access the company network using their own mobile phone, their personal laptop, their preferred tablet. As you know, from a logistical standpoint, that’s not always as easy as employees might assume. Setting them up with remote access to their office e-mail account is one thing. Setting them up with enterprise mobile printing is quite another.

PrinterLogic is designed to adapt to a range of enterprise print environments, and that includes mobile device printing. Thanks to its e-mail-to-print capabilities, any authorized user with a browser-capable device can print to any authorized printer. That means Sam with his Android smartphone can easily print at the branch office where he happens to be working this week, or Sally can print that report for her colleagues on their department printer—even though she’s vacationing in Hawaii and only has her iPad. Your IT staff has complete control over who can print where. So it’s secure, but it’s also as easy and convenient as mobile enterprise printing solutions can be.

Unlike hacks and workarounds that might deliver similar benefits, PrinterLogic’s enterprise mobile printing solution has the advantage of being completely native. It integrates seamlessly with the operating system’s built-in print dialogs and allows users to print to a single global printer while releasing the job at a specific physical printer.

PrinterLogic also doesn’t rely on proprietary APIs like Google Cloud Print or iOS printing to work. Yet it integrates beautifully with third-party services like Active Directory, allowing you to decide which users are authorized to print from their mobile devices and to which printers.

The icing on the cake? Just because PrinterLogic allows you to cater to your mobile workforce doesn’t mean you have to forgo its benefits. Mobile print jobs are subject to the same comprehensive print job auditing as those generated at in-house workstations. So you can generate reports to monitor consumables usage, track which employees are regularly printing large documents, or use rule-based deleting to purge unreleased print jobs. All that can save significant costs over time.

We can’t guarantee that everything about the mobile workforce revolution will be so straightforward, but with PrinterLogic as your enterprise mobile printing solution, your company will be making a big, comfortable stride into becoming the workplace of tomorrow.

Posted by Andrew Miller

Of the many responsibilities that fall to the IT department, managing the enterprise printing environment scores somewhere near the very bottom on the fun-o-meter. And if we’re honest, dealing with that environment from the end-user side doesn’t rank very highly on employees’ enjoyment scale, either. Probably for the very same reasons.

Which is why, like e-mail, enterprise printing is not only vital to the basic day-to-day function of your organization, its smooth operation is absolutely crucial to keeping employees happy. In other words: Devoting inordinate amounts of time to keeping the print environment up and running is simply a headache that goes with the IT territory, right?

False—or at least, it doesn’t have to be. If you were to eliminate print servers by deploying PrinterLogic’s printer management software throughout your organization, you could reduce the time you spend on managing printers by more than 50%. That’s what data collected by a recent TechValidate survey of hundreds of PrinterLogic customers revealed for more than 68% of respondents. Even better, 44% of enterprises reported a reduction in print management time of at least 70%.

How exactly does PrinterLogic let you experience the relief of eliminating print servers while drastically cutting the time that print management demands?

• 
  Central management:
  
  Via a single web-based printer management interface for the whole enterprise, you can deploy printers without GPOs, scripts or print servers. You can even set default preferences with a click. It doesn’t matter whether you have ten printers or ten thousand.
• 
  Lighten the network load:
  
  To reduce network congestion and speed up print times, PrinterLogic cuts out the hardware middlemen, so you can print directly to printers from end-point devices enterprise-wide. Furthermore, PrinterLogic can integrate with WAN caching technologies for local driver download. That also makes printer driver management a lot easier.
• 
  Remove single points of failure:
  
  In the event of a WAN outage or a host server failure, PrinterLogic enables your entire organization to continue printing without skipping a beat.

So you see, enterprise print management doesn’t have to be a time vortex. PrinterLogic lets you replicate all the functionality offered by traditional print servers while streamlining driver management, simplifying printer deployment, cutting service desk calls and slashing downtime. Now, what are you going to do with all that extra time on your hands?

Posted by Kyle Yardley

Orlando Florida was the site for Citrix Synergy 2015. Spirits were just as bright as the sunshine and the wonderful warm Florida weather. Attendees from all over the world showed up to learn more about ideas and products surrounding Citrix. Given the difficulty printing presents in a Citrix environment, we saw a steady stream of attendees wanting to learn more about how we can help them.

For all the benefits your Citrix environment provides, easy print management is simply not one of them. But with PrinterLogic’s web application you can eliminate all your print servers, even if your organization uses Citrix. The software provides three possible ways to provision printers into Citrix sessions.

• Using the Citrix Universal Printer—Using PrinterLogic to provision direct IP printers to the endpoint device, and then printing to the Citrix Universal Printer provides print job compression, driver-less printing and simplified administration.
• Using session Printers—Using PrinterLogic direct IP session printers provides print job compression, driver-less printing and simplified administration.
• Using Citrix Auto-Created Printers—Using PrinterLogic direct IP session printers provides instant printer creation, improved Citrix server performance, Citrix Universal Print Driver support, Proximity printing/location-based printing and Self-service printer installation.

Click here to read more about PrinterLogic and how we help you simplify Citrix Printing. If you haven’t already, let us give you a demo so you can see for yourself how we are working with customers to eliminate print servers and simplify their Citrix print environments.

Posted by Andrew Miller

Before you start reading, please be sure to check out our previous post on the subject of ROI and eliminating print servers in your organization using PrinterLogic. In that post we took a brief look at how quickly our customers surveyed typically saw ROI. And the stats were pretty impressive: Nearly half did so in under six months and 75% achieved ROI in 12 months or less.

We also gave some examples of enterprise printing turned cost-effective: The small K-12 school district that saw more than 100% ROI in three months, the Fortune 500 insurance company that saw more than 200% ROI after six months, or the government agency that saw a remarkable 400% ROI after eighteen months.

But how do those individual examples stack up in the aggregate?

That same TechValidate survey shows that an amazing 83% of our enterprise customers realized between 100 and 400% ROI after adopting PrinterLogic as their print management solution. A full 44% of those surveyed showed ROI of 100–199%. Another 44% of saw ROI of 200% or more, with some additional customers seeing ROI as high as 500% or greater.

Mind you, these weren’t similarly sized customers from one particular sector. They ran the gamut—small, medium and large organizations operating in fields ranging from education to agriculture, chemicals, insurance and IT. Such as the Fortune 500 computer services firm with more than 100 sites that saw an ROI of more than 300% in one year. Or the banking company that saw equally amazing results in just three months (“Users are not afraid of printing anymore,” they said). Or the large enterprise construction company that saw an ROI of over 400% in six months, owing to a 70% drop in three crucial areas: time spent on print management, print-related service desk calls and printer downtime.

Even the organizations that saw a modest ROI (by comparison, of course) did so in record time. One Fortune 500 energy and utilities company experienced more than 100% ROI in under six months. A small business providing financial services also saw an ROI of more than 100% after implementing PrinterLogic printer management software. Believe it or not, that took less than three months.

So when you take a closer look, not only at the time in which these organizations realized ROI, but also at the percentage of ROI that was achieved, the real question is: Can your organization afford not to eliminate print servers by installing PrinterLogic as your enterprise printer management solution?

Posted by Kyle Yardley

Another great week in Las Vegas. The lights were bright and the excitement was high as we sponsored Interop 2015 at the beautiful Mandalay Bay Convention center.

We were there to showcase our enterprise printer management solution. It never ceases to amaze me how excited people get when we tell them they can eliminate their print servers. Disbelief quickly turns into excitement when I tell them we also enable centrally managed direct IP printing and empower end users to install their own printers.

Our Release Printing module was also a big hit. It provides server-less and secure pull printing that allows users to print from any device to any network printer. Because they have to be physically at the printer, organizations get the added benefit of increased security and reduced waste of print consumables. We also featured our Mobile Printing solution, which will be announced next month. Don’t want to give too much away, but we’ll be offering a very simple way for IT to enable mobile, BYOD users and guests to print, and it won’t matter if they are on or off network.

Also, who knew that you can actually eliminate those Windows 2003 print servers instead of migrating to new print servers? As we know that the end of support is coming up July 14th 2015, we need to hurry and find a solution that can solve this. Look no further! Don’t Migrate. Eliminate Your Print Servers.

If you haven’t already, let us give you a demo so you can see for yourself how we are working with customers to eliminate print servers, empower IT and staff, cut costs and enhance print management.

Interop is a leading independent technology conference and expo designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world’s IT community. It featured new programs, networking opportunities and classes that help organizations’ IT action plans.