Chromebook Printing Got You Down?

Originally published March 14, 2023. 

January 2021 marked the beginning of something special: no more Google Cloud printing. 

Google Cloud Print offered Chromebook users an easy way to print, but let’s be honest, it wasn’t exactly the most robust printing application on the market. 

Why is Chromebook printing important?

Chromebook printing is important because Chromebooks generally offer the same memory, speed, and functionality as other operating systems—without the high price tag. 

Chromebooks are cheap (mostly under $400), the operating system is stable and fast, they have an outstanding battery life, and are utilized heavily in the education industry for distance learning. 

Additionally, it’s easier to put Chromebooks in the hands of students and workers alike because they give them all of the tools needed to perform daily tasks.

Except for printing with a Chromebook, that is. 

Here we are two years after Google Cloud Print’s deprecation. You’re still digging to figure out how to manage Chromebook print environments. Or you might be stocking up on Chromebooks for the first time, wondering what all the fuss is about. 

Either way, don’t let Chromebook printing get you down. 

We’re here to help by providing you with a list of Chromebook printing “don’ts” and an easier path to Chromebook printing once and for all. 

The Don’ts of Printing from a Chromebook

Before you start endlessly researching How to print with Chromebooks or How to print after Google Cloud Print, let’s eliminate the complicated tutorials and jump right into the “don’ts” of Chromebook printing. 

Don’t spend money on Chromebook-compatible printers.

Many quick fixes ask you to buy printers compatible with Chromebooks. Chromebooks can connect to newer printers via WiFi or a USB cable and have the drivers built in to handle most manufacturers. Many network and USB printers can work with your Chromebook right out of the gates. 

Have a lot of older, incompatible printers in your fleet?

Before you start thinking about buying Google-certified printers just to get your Chromebook print environment off and running, some solutions offer extensions that provide you with the compatibility you need to have a fully Chromebook-agnostic print environment. Solutions like these help you save money on time and hardware costs.

Don’t forget to update your systems.

If you haven’t updated your system in a while, it might cause your Chromebook to be uncooperative. Even if you set Chromebooks to update automatically, you still might have to “Restart to Update” to complete the installation. 

Furthermore, don’t forget to keep your printer firmware up-to-date to avoid running into future problems. Updating your printer firmware ensures smoother printing, enhances security, keeps compatibility with new operating systems, and unlocks new features that may not have been available on previous firmware versions. 

Don’t waste time manually connecting Chromebooks to your printers.

Admins assigned to a large fleet of printers with different makes and models simply don’t have the time to manually connect printers to their Chromebooks. Even if you successfully complete the daunting task of manually connecting all your Chromebooks with your printers, you’ll likely still be running infinite circles to ensure your users can always print. 

Some older printers don’t have the internet capability to connect manually via an internet connection. If you have a lot of older printers in your fleet, you could find yourself connecting Chromebooks using a USB cable. This old-school process significantly reduces end user mobility and wastes more of your valuable time. 

Don’t limit user mobility.

It’s easy to throw in the towel and ask your end users to connect to the printer via USB to print. Although it’s a great security measure, it’s not the best in educational settings or professional environments. Students moving from classroom to classroom need to be able to print on the fly. The same goes for hybrid work environments where users move from office to office. 

Any time a user is on your company network, they should be able to print to the nearest printer on the local network. Connecting via USB or limiting a group of users to a specific printer decreases productivity and doesn’t allow you to fully utilize other printers in your environment or equally disperse print job traffic.

Don’t sacrifice security.

It’s common to see admins manage Chromebook print queues using print servers. While they may be effective in terms of management, they pose too much of a risk in today’s print environments. Print spooler vulnerabilities like PrintNightmare turned routine printer installations and driver deployments into full-on marathons so users could print. 

Not to mention, there are situations where end users may use their Chromebooks to print to their home office printers, which aren’t always on a secure network. Printing to unsecured printers not only puts personal information at risk but puts the company’s critical data at risk as well. 

So how do you get the most out of Chromebook printing in your environment without overspending on compatible printers, wasting time on manual updates, and sacrificing security? 

Chromebook Printing for Enterprises and SMBs

Take all the uncertainty out of Chromebook printing with the PrinterLogic Chrome OS Extension. Get broad printer compatibility with driverless printing technology and access your printers’ advanced features on-the-fly to get the best possible output on every print job. The 100% device-agnostic Extension quickly pulls the printers’ settings and configures them for Chromebook users.

No more IT intervention necessary!

Better yet, no internet connection or a cloud-based service is needed to make printing work. 

 

FAQs

What printers work with Chromebooks?

While you’ll see various articles recommending Chromebook-compatible printers, we don’t recommend that as your first step. We’ve built a Chrome extension for Chromebook printing that bypasses the need to purchase new printers just so they “work with Chromebooks”. 

 

How do you print from a Chromebook?

By using our Chrome extension, of course. But if you’re not using that, there are quick steps to print from your Chromebook. Simply hit CTRL + P, select your Destination and preferred Printer. Click Print. Again, the challenge is some available printers may not be compatible with your Chromebook so try out our extension if you have trouble. 

 

Why can’t my Chromebook connect to my printer?

The most common issue is your devices are not connected to the same network. If that’s not the case, consider rebooting the devices involved: printers, Wifi, your Chromebook, etc.

 

Start getting the most out of your Chromebook print environment and provide your end users with the flexibility they need to print on the go. 

Get a free 30-day trial of our Chrome OS Extension today!

How to Eliminate Your School District’s Print Servers

Did you know that the national gross domestic product (GDP) is growing 13.5% faster than public education budgets? It’s one of many reasons schools face continued funding shortages. As budget cuts continue, K-12 schools are desperate to find ways to make more efficient use of their resources. One of the top ways to save money for years to come is to eliminate print servers in your school district. 

Print servers are clunky, expensive, and difficult to maintain. They’re also a headache for IT teams, which means schools have to add and pay additional IT staff members. As more K-12 schools move away from print servers, both teachers and students are finding benefits far beyond improved finances, such as improved data security, faster printing time, and easier scalability. To help your school district move from print servers to a centralized, serverless print management system, here are the three easy steps you need to take. 

  

 

Deploy Chrome OS Client Extension to Chromebooks or Users From Google Admin Console

The PrinterLogic ChromeOS Client extension enables your ChromeOS workstation to communicate with your instance of PrinterLogic. The client installed on your ChromeOS Device communicates with PrinterLogic on a regular basis. To help eliminate print servers in your school district, start by deploying the ChromeOS Client Extension to Chromebooks or specific Google Chrome users from the Google Admin console. The Chrome extension allows users to easily migrate from Google Cloud Print. From there, you can add printers, change print settings, manage printers, see the print queue, view the release portal, and refresh configurations. 

Integration with Chrome is becoming more important than ever. Chromebooks have become an essential part of school culture, with more than 50 million students and teachers using Chromebooks every day. Moving away from print servers wouldn’t be complete without involving Chromebooks. As more school districts upgrade to centralized, serverless print management systems, they’re enjoying the benefit of easier and faster printing—including from tablets and Chromebooks. Chromebook cloud printing is a quick, simple way for students and teachers to print from anywhere in the school. 

 

 

Manage Printers and Deployment Settings in the PrinterLogic Admin Console 

Once you have the Chrome extension installed, the next step is to manage printers and deployment settings in the PrinterLogic Admin Console. PrinterLogic is flexible and offers a variety of settings, so you can tailor the settings to the needs of your individual school or district. With the PrinterLogic Admin Console, you can manage users, devices, drivers, and more all from one centralized location.

Your printing quotas require careful consideration. Serverless print management software allows admins to easily establish printing quotas, which can be different for teachers, students, and other faculty positions. Quotas prevent people from printing in excess and using paper unnecessarily. Sometimes overprinting is a genuine mistake, like when a teacher meant to print a single page but accidentally printed a whole chapter. Other times, overprinting is the result of carelessness. Either way, print quotas prevent the waste of paper, ink, and electricity. Print quotas can also help manage wear and tear on the physical printers and indicate when parts may need to be replaced. 

The settings also have another use: information. The data that serverless printing software gathers from print jobs offers important insights into who is using paper and when. With that data, school admins can make strategic decisions to adjust quotas, better understand teachers’ and students’ needs, and better allocate resources. The data can show trends over time, by demographic, and by location so schools know exactly how resources are used. By moving away from print servers, IT teams gain full visibility into all user scan activity within the Admin Console. That visibility helps IT teams manage security, improve workflows, track cost-savings, protect budgets, and even inform future purchases, such as buying additional scanners for staff. 

Skip the Server and Print Directly to the Network Printers

After completing the first two steps, you’re free to send print jobs directly to network printers from your ChromeOS device. PrinterLogic is OS-agnostic, so you can print from nearly any device. 

Because the print jobs go directly to network printers instead of to a server, the printing time is faster. Students and teachers will be able to retrieve their print jobs before the bell rings. 

The district IT team will breathe a sigh of relief with network printers, too, because there are no more drivers to install, no more print queue problems, and fewer clunky hardware issues to fix. Without print servers, your school also has a lower risk of data breaches, which your IT team will be happy about. 

Print management solutions and cloudless servers mean your IT team can focus on more meaningful initiatives. According to TechnologyLab, some of the top priorities for forward-looking IT teams in K-12 schools are:

  • Implementing AI-driven adaptive learning platforms to cater to individual student needs.
  • Using AI-powered analytics to assess student performance and tailor teaching strategies accordingly.
  • Integrating virtual assistants and chatbots to enhance student support services.

 

When IT teams don’t have to spend their time fixing outdated print servers, those are the priorities they can invest their efforts in. IT teams can shift their focus to implementing cutting-edge solutions that offer students more opportunities to learn. 

To learn more about how PrinterLogic solution can help your school district move from time- and money-draining print servers to fast, centralized print management networks, schedule a free demo with us today.

How Schools Can Save Money by Using Enterprise Print Management Systems

Originally published on November 17, 2016

When searching for an effective education printing solution, take a look at enterprise printing solutions. You’d be surprised at how easily they can fit your checklist of requirements. Education printing solutions and enterprise printing solutions require reliability, scalability, security, and ease of use for administrators and end users. They also need all the bells and whistles to integrate with the ever-changing tech industry.  For example, mobile devices are used more than ever in today’s classrooms, implying that mobile print solutions are necessary to enable mobile users to print from anywhere in the school. 

Overall, print management software for schools needs to combat all the difficulties that administrators and students encounter in their print environment. Here are some of the top printing challenges that educational institutions, specifically K-12 schools, face and how enterprise print management systems solve those problems for both teachers and students. 


Printing Challenges that Educational Institutions Face 

Challenge #1: Intensive High-Volume Printing

The average school uses roughly 360,000 sheets of office paper per year—and that’s not including textbooks. To handle such high-volume printing, schools need reliable printers, simple-to-use printing software, and print management training to organize print jobs. Teachers may have to print hundreds of pages for tests and worksheets correlative to the number of students in the class. Conversely, students may also print thick stacks of paper for study materials, note-taking, and research. 

When attempting high-volume print jobs, not only is your printer under pressure to deliver the goods, but a school’s print server is more likely to fail in this type of print environment. Additionally, high-volume printing greatly reduces print speeds for end users across the board, specifically when students attempt to print large jobs simultaneously.

Solution: Adopt a Serverless Printing Infrastructure

Enterprise print management systems, such as Vasion’s PrinterLogic SaaS, help get rid of your print servers by offering a serverless printing infrastructure that allows you to centrally manage printer objects, profiles, drivers, and settings from a single pane of glass. Additionally, print jobs don’t queue in a spooler, eliminating heavy print traffic and long wait times. 

Furthermore, admins have complete oversight of their devices’ status. Through print alerts and SNMP monitoring, IT admins gain immediate insight into everyday errors like empty paper trays or the operational state of every compatible printer in the fleet. All in all, SNMP monitoring assists IT professionals by catching potential issues before they arise.

Challenge #2: Students Are Constantly Moving

Whether they are moving between classrooms or to a different building across campus, one thing is for sure: students are always on the go. That movement presents a printing challenge because students will still need to access a printer with each classroom change.

The homeroom classroom or library isn’t always close enough. Students and teachers need to be able to send print jobs to a nearby printer no matter where they are. Print management solutions for universities and other educational institutions must account for this type of highly mobile, location-shifted printing.

Solution: Self-Installation Portals

PrinterLogic’s Self-Installation Portal empowers end users to be responsible for their own print jobs. Using the portal, students and teachers can locate and install printers with a single click. Admins can also upload customizable floor plan maps for their schools, helping students and teachers locate their nearest printers. 

Perhaps one of the biggest returns of this feature is the cost savings. A school’s IT admins can now be more productive in other areas and step away from irritating print-related issues. 

Oklahoma City Community College (OCCC) witnessed the benefits of self-service provisioning firsthand when they migrated to PrinterLogic SaaS. Not only did OCCC give users more control, but the IT department also experienced fewer helpdesk calls.

Challenge #3: Lack of Versatility

Some schools take what they can get with the resources they are given. This might mean buying low-cost computers and printers, regardless of brand, which creates a mixed-OS print environment that can be a chore to manage. Many schools utilize a mixed-OS print environment and require a printing solution compatible with all their devices. 

This especially rings true for mobile devices and Chromebooks, which are regularly used in schools because they are affordable and accessible. Chromebooks are versatile, too, because they come with the ability to run Android, Linux, the web, and Windows programs. However, they aren’t heralded for their printing prowess. 

During the COVID pandemic, Chromebooks surged from a tech novelty to an indispensable classroom tool; however, since Google Print Cloud’s discontinuation at the end of 2020, schools have had to search for an alternative way to print in their Chromebook-centric classrooms. 

Solution: PrinterLogic’s Chrome OS Client Extension 

At the end of 2021, it was estimated that over 40 million students and teachers used Chromebooks in the classroom, signifying that the need to print with these devices is critical moving forward. PrinterLogic’s Chromebook Printing Solution provides schools with a way to harness Chromebook’s true printing capabilities. 

Free of charge with PrinterLogic SaaS’s Core Bundle, Chromebooks can now be a part of your mixed-OS printing environment. Along with eliminating the need for print servers, PrinterLogic’s Chrome OS Client Extension doesn’t rely on the internet to execute print jobs and keeps print jobs local and secure. 

The extension is easy to deploy since PrinterLogic employs the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) that takes printer settings and automatically configures them for Chromebook users throughout the school. This process allows students and teachers to choose their desired options and send their print jobs directly to the nearest printer. 

Even if your school doesn’t use Chromebooks as a primary educational device, PrinterLogic’s enterprise-grade Mobile Printing feature enables students and teachers to print natively from tablets or other mobile devices.

Challenge #4: Excessive Waste and Redundancy

As schools face continued budget cuts, there’s no room for waste. Paper waste stacks up from eager fingers clicking “Print” multiple times when a printer doesn’t immediately spring into action or when a teacher accidentally prints a 300-page book instead of printing a selection of pages. 

Without a way to manage each print job, it’s hard to pinpoint which classrooms are going through paper and toner at a higher-than-normal rate.

Solution: PrinterLogic’s Quota Management Feature

Why constantly think about budgeting and print management when there is a feature specifically designed to do all the work for you? By implementing PrinterLogic’s Quota Management feature into your print environment, your IT admin can oversee print jobs based on two key criteria: price and volume

Once you determine the criteria for print jobs across your school, you can break it down further by limiting the number of print jobs per individual or group. Doing this alone already enhances the economy of your print environment. However, PrinterLogic takes it one step further with a time-delayed printing feature designed to prevent printing the same print job multiple times due to end-user impatience. 

Admins can set the time limit between attempted print jobs in the Admin Console. They can also limit users and groups to a predetermined number of pages for each individual print job. Need to raise (or lower) the allotted page count and print spending? Trusted users can adjust quotas midstream to fit their current financial situation.

Challenge #5: Limited Collaboration

Collaboration on physical documents may be limited. For example, teachers and staff may need to physically share lesson plans, permission slips, or other documents. They may also need to send them via email by manually attaching digital files, which becomes cumbersome as more documents need sharing. Additionally, staff and administrators across districts may be limited in their ability to access important documents from remote locations. This issue can make it difficult to collaborate with others, especially when class is remote or teachers are grading from home.

Solution: Enhance Document Shareability

Staff and teachers can quickly scan paper documents in a print management system and send the files to anyone in the school instead of manually attaching files to emails at their desks. Overall, this quick-scan feature saves time typically spent on tedious, manual tasking, and staff members can easily collaborate faster and more often. The best part of enhanced document shareability? Teachers can take advantage of this feature without compromising data security. 

Challenge #6: Unorganized Document Management

Classrooms see lots of paper every day, ranging from student work and homework to permission slips, packets, and other learning materials. All these loose documents can be difficult to maintain and organize if educators or staff members don’t stay on top of it all the time. With high teacher turnover and frequent substitute teachers, classrooms need organized documents to make sure students are still staying on track with lesson plans. 

The lack of storage space becomes an issue as well, which contributes to the chaos. With limited space and high disorganization, it’s hard for teachers to store and keep track of collected, signed parental permission forms and other documents.

Solution: Transition Away from Physical Documents

Scan paper documents into digital files on a print management system, reducing the need for constant printing, sharing, and storing hard copies while easing the load on physical storage cabinets. Doing this keeps your files organized, too, so teachers can always find lesson plans and assignments on servers without having to hunt for them. 

Print management systems can also help teachers collect student and guardian permission forms and registration papers from any device. Print management solutions come with drag-and-drop eForm builders so teachers can quickly customize forms. PDF-to-web form converters make it easy to work with forms in different formats, and the forms are embeddable to any website. 

Challenge #7: No Printing Oversight 

Administration often can’t see who is printing what, when, and how often until the printer runs out of paper and ink or throws up errors. Without oversight, teachers and students are also free to print as much as they’d like. There aren’t any restrictions in place to help protect against excessive printing. 

Without proper printing oversight, schools are also at risk of data breaches. Around 27% of IT security incidents are related to paper documents. To limit hacking and data breaches from unattended printed paper, oversight is vital. 

Solution: Access Printing Insights

Not only does accessing printing insights help increase security and decrease the risk of data breaches, but oversight can also help improve efficiency. Get full visibility into all user scan activity within a print management system’s admin console to manage security and improve workflows to track cost-savings, project budgets, and even inform future purchases, like additional scanners for staff. 

Printing oversight offers insights into efficiency, too, identifying which printers are used most, who is hitting their quotas fastest, what kinds of documents are printed most frequently, and how to find ways to reduce printed paper. In print management systems, those with oversight access can create quotas. Quotas can be assigned by modes, encouraging users to use color, collated, or other specialty printing scrupulously.

Challenge #8: Printer Overload

When too many users print from the same printer, print queues can get lengthy, ink and toner replacements proliferate, and technical issues are more common. These issues get costly—not to mention the general wear and tear on the printer itself (which can be expensive when it’s time to repair or replace the hardware).

Solution: Be Kind to Your Printer

Print management solutions pace print jobs and materials so the printers don’t get overwhelmed. This software can also monitor ink levels, paper levels, paper jams, and technical problems to help fix issues before they happen. Predictive maintenance is another feature that helps school districts save money before repairs become expensive.


Give Your Print Environment an A+

Despite the numerous challenges listed above, schools have options for tackling printing challenges. Enterprise print management systems, especially Vasion’s PrinterLogic solution, can help solve printing problems. Thanks to its versatility, stability, ease of management, and convenient security features, PrinterLogic is the one print management solution that lives up to these unique demands placed on educational print environments. Delivering all the cost benefits and efficiencies you would expect from enterprise printing solutions makes PrinterLogic one of the best print management solutions for K-12 schools. 

Chromebook Printing Advantages with PrinterLogic

For about 10 years now, the popularity of Chromebooks has seen a steady increase—not just in the K-12 educational sector (although they have been pretty dominant there) but also in workplaces where Chromebooks’ unique mix of affordability, easy management, and ultra-portability checks all the right boxes. 

Yet, despite all their benefits, Chromebook printing is one of the issues that led to hiccups in their adoption. A minimalist, cloud-centric operating system like ChromeOS just wasn’t designed for most printers and traditional enterprise printing solutions.

Life after Google Cloud Print

Many moons ago, organizations turned to solutions like Google Cloud Print to act as middleware between their existing print infrastructure and their Chromebooks. 

And with reason. 

It met their basic printing needs, but it wasn’t equipped to meet enterprise-level demands. After its deprecation in January 2021, organizations were left without a solution to their Chromebook printing problems. However, this motivated software companies to engineer their own Chromebook printing solutions that cater to larger corporations.

With an abundance of solutions at your fingertips, it’s easy to be overwhelmed. But few offer a true SaaS enterprise print management solution that changes the way Chromebooks interact with your printer fleet and simplifies the end user experience at the same time.  

How PrinterLogic simplifies Chromebook printing

Unlike many conventional enterprise printing solutions, PrinterLogic prioritizes seamless integration and flexibility of deployment over commandeering functionality. This means it acts as a crucial enhancement to Chromebook printing rather than a straight-up alternative to Google Cloud Print—although it’s certainly powerful and full-featured enough to be implemented in that way too.

As you’d expect from a next-generation Chromebook printing solution, there’s no client-side software or printer-side software to install. 

That means Chromebook users can open a machine for the very first time and start printing to an authorized printer right away without resorting to calling the helpdesk.

Plus, PrinterLogic supports any network printer—including legacy devices—removing the need to buy new printers or specific models that are Google Cloud Print-compatible. You can designate any network printer for Chromebook printing with an ease of configuration that is simply unprecedented in print management.

Secure printing features with Chromebooks

Alongside this ease of administration and use, PrinterLogic provides admins with a degree of centralized oversight and control that legacy printing solutions can’t match. 

For example, using PrinterLogic’s centralized console, you can specify which printers users can print to—yet you can do so without resorting to the Group Policy Objects (GPOs) and scripts that you’ve traditionally been forced to rely on. Deployments take just a few clicks.

PrinterLogic’s optional Secure Release Printing method also adds a security aspect to Chromebook printing. When Chromebook users print, their print job is held until they specifically choose to execute it on their desired printer. In addition to being more convenient for highly mobile Chromebook users who rarely print to the same printer twice, this keeps jobs from being left exposed in the output tray—one of the leading causes of internal theft. 

Another option that plays into secure printing is the ability to automatically delete jobs that were not released using this method. You can simply set specific time periods (i.e. every 24 hours, every week, etc.) to delete print jobs being held in queue. 

Increasing print availability for Chromebooks

If PrinterLogic stopped at increased ease of management and enhanced secure printing capabilities, that might be enough for some organizations. But our on-prem and cloud-native enterprise printing solutions also ensure a highly available printing infrastructure that can withstand enterprise-scale challenges. 

In a nutshell, when your users are ready to print, your print infrastructure is too.

With that in mind, we have two Chromebook-related white papers that are worth a read. 

This one focuses on K-12 environments but has useful information on print-server bottlenecks and other Chromebook-printing issues that apply to enterprise environments. 

And this one examines Chromebook printing more generally. It highlights the compromises demanded by conventional enterprise printing solutions that can negate the benefits of Chromebook deployments—and how PrinterLogic can help.

Or maybe you’re a hands-on type of person. 

We get that. 

Rather than hearing about our enterprise Chromebook printing solution, you can just try it out in your environment.

Get PrinterLogic and its complete feature set free for 30 days.