Direct IP Printing vs. Print Servers: Pros and Cons of Each

All IT managers and system administrators who manage print environments must eventually choose between print servers and configuring direct IP printers on their endpoints. Either approach has trade-offs, and several factors come into play when deciding which method is best.

Company Size Matters

If your company only has a handful of employees, the differences between using a print server and managing printing via direct IP are not that obvious. However, as the organization grows, the pain points stemming from IT’s print management choices become evident. 

 

Why Use Print Servers?

A print server can alleviate growth-related pain points because admins get centralized management for drivers, profiles, and print job auditing. You can set printer permissions and use Group Policy to map printers to users or workstations. They integrate with backend applications like EMR, CRM, and ERP and provide one print environment for the entire company. They also haven’t changed in functionality for decades, so they are easy to maintain and manage with the proper experience.

 

Where Print Servers Miss The Mark

Despite the few positives of employing print servers, it’s hard to keep up with them in the modern-day workplace because they require more maintenance than ever before. Company data is at risk if you fail to stay up-to-date with print server patch installations. Print servers also thrive with homogeneous printer fleets, meaning a printer fleet of mixed manufacturers can cause serious issues. 

Additional negatives of print servers include:

Vulnerabilities: Print servers introduce many headaches and vulnerabilities. This means there is a single point of failure for everyone attached to that server. Organizations can expect performance and functionality issues when every printer driver lives, works, and spools on the same print device. 

Unreliable GPO Scripting: If there are multiple locations and only one print server, some of your print job traffic will traverse the WAN, often increasing the time it takes to print. On some WAN links, print job traffic can cause congestion and impact other communication across the link.

Price: You can install print servers at each location, but depending on how you deploy them, it can get expensive. Think of the hardware, licensing, and maintenance costs when using multiple print servers. 

Limited Support: Windows print servers are typically set up for Windows clients only. There are ways to support Mac clients, but they come with limitations.

 

Figure 1: The advantages and disadvantages of print servers

The Benefits of Direct IP Printing

With direct IP printing configurations, users are free to manage their printers and profile settings. You gain the advantage of local spooling and rendering print jobs which boosts security. And those jobs go directly from the workstation to the printer. 

Direct IP printing is the most efficient way of printing and reduces overall network traffic. A driver issue or a job stuck in the print queue will only affect one user instead of your entire organization. Direct IP is also cost-effective because there’s no additional print management hardware to buy or maintain.

 

Problems with Direct IP Printing

The decentralized nature of direct IP printing environments is often considered a pain point for IT teams. Admins can’t track costs or identify print job activity throughout the company without employing a third-party print management solution for assistance. Plus, direct print from IP isn’t ideal for hybrid or remote work environments that are constantly changing. 

Additional pain points of direct IP printer environments include:

Time-Consuming Configuration: IT teams have to add printer drivers and configure them by IP address on every workstation. Not to mention IT teams have to keep up with changes and driver updates. 

Difficult Printer Replacement: A simple task of changing out a printer could require IT staff to touch all affected workstations, which is time-consuming. In dynamic environments, these efforts will inevitably fall behind, hurting user productivity.

Less Oversight and Management: Employees set their own printing rules without centralized group policy management, making it hard to keep up with print environments. 

Not a Scalable Solution: When the number of printers in your fleet reaches the hundreds and thousands, the manual labor required becomes overbearing just to keep printing flowing. 

 

Figure 2: Direct IP printing benefits and disadvantages

PrinterLogic: The Best of Both Worlds

What if I told you there is a way to get the centralized management benefits of a print server while maintaining the stability and efficiency of direct IP printing? You know, have your cake and eat it too.

PrinterLogic eliminates the need for print servers while providing a way to manage and install direct IP printers centrally. With PrinterLogic, you can easily convert your existing Microsoft print server environment to our serverless direct IP printing solution. 

Have multiple print servers? We take care of that too. 

You can also manage all printers and drivers from a single web-based Admin Console. PrinterLogic gives you more visibility into printing activity with an Advanced Reporting feature, allowing for a detailed view of all print jobs by users, departments, printers, and more.

PrinterLogic offers an on-premise solution and PrinterLogic SaaS (our cloud printing platform), so you can choose which version works best for you without sacrificing features or functionality. We have plenty of technical documentation to help your set-up go smoothly, too.  

Figure 3: PrinterLogic offers centralized management plus the efficiencies of direct IP

 

 

5 Ways Print Management Can Save Your School Money

Budget cuts, underfunding, and rising costs are constant challenges for America’s public schools. Because the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) is growing 13.5% faster than public education budgets, the education funding gap is only worsening.

Certainly, it’s a complex problem with no clear-cut solutions. But there’s one simple way schools can save money and reduce costs: by making the switch to serverless printing. It’s a move that can save public schools thousands of dollars annually, allowing them to reduce waste and put precious funds toward more important causes.

Wondering how it’s possible? Let’s discuss five ways smarter print management helps schools save big.

1. Reduce Costs by Eliminating Print Servers

Print servers are a massive drain on public school budgets. The hardware alone can cost schools $2,000 to $5,000 per server. That cost doesn’t account for the money spent on continuous maintenance nor the time spent on manual updating for fixes and security patches. Print servers are also highly susceptible to security vulnerabilities and the physical theft of sensitive documents. Even worse, they create a single point of failure for printing. If one server crashes, it limits everyone in the school from continuing to print until the issue is resolved.

Serverless printing resolves these pain points by ditching the costly legacy architecture in favor of a streamlined, secure direct IP print environment. Serverless printing reduces the attack surface, keeps data secure, and puts thousands of dollars back into the school’s budget.

2. Leverage Quota Management to Reduce Print Jobs

Traditional print environments make it extremely difficult to control printing costs. The average American uses more than 700 pounds of paper every year, and without print quotas, teachers and administrators are likely to print whatever they want with little oversight.

In contrast, serverless printing allows schools to restrict print usage to a sensible amount. It forces staff to take a more thoughtful approach to printing activities and act more responsibly, rather than sporadically. Print quotas can be assigned by modes, too, so users limit costly activities such as color printing or collated printing. Quota management is simple and intuitive, allowing administrators to create custom settings quickly and easily.

Print quotas save schools money, and they also help schools become more sustainable and eco-friendly — without making huge changes to internal processes.

3. Avoid Security Breaches with Secure Release/Pull Printing

Unmanaged print servers create massive amounts of waste. In fact, 70% of all office waste comes from paper, and up to 30% of all print jobs are never picked up from the printer. Not only is all that waste bad for the environment, it also creates a serious security risk.

Serverless print management eliminates the security issue by utilizing secure release/pull printing. With this added security layer, users send their print job and the job is held in the print queue until the user arrives to authenticate it at the printer. This approach greatly enhances security and increases the confidentiality of sensitive documents. It also reduces print waste and saves schools more money.

4. Minimize the Need for Costly Printing Materials

When public schools implement print features like quota management and secure release printing, staff members are more judicious with their printing. They think twice before they print personal or unnecessary documents, causing the total number of print jobs to shrink significantly. 

Since the average organization spends $1,200 annually in print materials per employee, this reduction equates to big savings. Schools that print less can also buy fewer print materials, including costly ink and toner. These cost reductions make a big impact over time, giving schools the freedom to use funds for more important aspects of education.

5. Reduce Help Desk Tickets and Reliance on IT

IT costs can be another major drain on public schools’ budgets. IT support isn’t cheap, and as much as 50% of all help desk tickets are printer-related. Print servers also make it difficult for IT professionals to gain visibility and insight into printing activity, making it tough for them to identify areas for cost reduction.

Serverless printers help mitigate this problem by reducing the number of print jobs. By doing so, there is also a lower need for IT staff. Cloud-based solutions also provide greater visibility and insights that empower IT staff to do their job quickly and efficiently, so schools can spend less on IT support and more on direct education needs.

Switch to Serverless Printing and Save Now

Print servers are a burden on public school budgets, staff members, and IT professionals alike. They’re costly, inefficient, clunky, and lack the oversight needed for schools with limited budgets. So, when schools are seeking simple ways to reduce costs and save money, we always recommend eliminating print servers as the first step.

Modern print management solutions make it easy for schools with limited budgets to increase efficiency, collaboration, visibility, and more. They reduce the number of print jobs and help desk tickets related to printing while also making schools more efficient, sustainable, and secure.

If your school is ready to make the switch to serverless printing, get in touch with Vasion today. We’d love to help you discover many benefits that come with the future of print management.

Supercharge Your Output Management With Confirmed Delivery: Your Questions Answered

Has this happened to you? You sent a print job to a printer and walked across the office just to be met with an empty tray with no indication of what went wrong. Output Management’s newest solution, Confirmed Delivery, can prevent the frustrating walkback. Using widely supported printer commands, we can get confirmation from the printer itself that direct IP print jobs were successful, preventing the troubleshooting headache.


Why Confirmed Delivery?

Confirmed Delivery gives you real-time status updates of your direct IP print jobs from the printer itself. This gives you better insight into what’s happening with your print jobs without getting up and checking the printer manually. In addition to being notified about any problems the printer has while completing the job, Confirmed Delivery also makes job status reporting with ERPs (like SAP) and print stats with PrinterLogic much more accurate. 

You probably have additional questions, and we’ve got answers. Let’s dive in. 


How do I receive print job status updates?

Many modern printers support the command language, Print Job Language (PJL) developed by HP. Output Management today uses PJL commands to communicate job parameters such as Copies, Paper Tray, and Duplex to the printer. 

When the Output Management Service Client sends a direct IP print job to a printer with Confirmed Delivery enabled, it sends PJL USTATUS headers to the printer. These headers request the printer to reply to the Output Management Service Client with various updates about the job as they happen. These updates include printer status, tray status, printed pages, running out of paper, job cancellation, and print success. 

Output Management will then wait a configurable amount of time for a response from the printer. If you don’t receive a response within that window of time, it could be due to a couple of reasons:

  1. A printer issue that requires user intervention (i.e. the printer ran out of paper). In this case, you’re given a configurable window of time to fix the printer’s issue so the job may automatically resume.
  2. PJL USTATUS is not supported on your printer. In this case, the print job is treated as a regular Output Management job. You’ll receive the standard confirmation that the printer received the job. 


How does this benefit me?

Seamless print redirection

With more accurate job failure reporting, if the printer reports a job failure, that trigger can hook directly into Rules & Routing for quick job redirection to another printer. This helps ensure that business-critical printing isn’t stopped by one printer mishap.

Accurate print stats

If a job is canceled or fails part way through, the printer can report how many pages it has already printed. This greatly improves the accuracy of your print stats, especially if your past-canceled jobs would have otherwise been marked as complete successes.

Better print debugging

With trace or debug level logging enabled on the Output Management Service Client, you can get useful information from your printer about how it’s handling a given job and see the exact response from the printer in the logs.


Now, how do I enable it?

At the time of writing, Confirmed Delivery is enabled similarly to Off-Network Printing.

There are three components to enabling confirmed delivery:

  1. The global toggle that enables the feature
  2. The behavior that printers follow by default
  3. The printer-specific behavior

Confirmed Delivery can be turned on and off at any point at the global level (within the Admin Console). This keeps you in control of your job’s progress and ignores all other settings. By default, every printer follows the global behavior of having Confirmed Delivery enabled or disabled. This is useful when creating new printers and controlling which printers already use Confirmed Delivery.

Additionally, each printer can optionally override the default behavior and use its specific Confirmed Delivery behavior. For example, you could have Confirmed Delivery set to disabled by default but enable it for a specific printer.

The first two components are global settings inside of PrinterLogic. Once logged in, navigate to Tools > Settings > General > Confirmed Delivery. The printer-specific settings are located on the printer’s Port tab.

 


Where can I find out more?

With Output Management Confirmed Delivery, you can rest easy knowing that your output makes it where it needs to be, in the format it needs to be in, and when it needs to be there. Most importantly, you won’t have to walk over to an empty printer tray. If you have additional questions, refer to our FAQ

Schedule a demo today and let’s have a conversation about improving your output processes.

Print Management in a Hybrid Environment

Hybrid print environments can take many forms. 

For instance, one hybrid environment might comprise a mix of new and legacy printing devices. Another might be a combination of mobile and desktop users. Yet another hybrid environment might piecemeal together printing software or print management services to serve the unique requirements of different user pools. It’s not uncommon for some hybrid environments to include a little bit of all of the above.

But the burning question is: How do you simplify print management in hybrid environments?

We’ll answer that. But first, let’s delve into the difficulties IT teams are facing.

 

The Problems With Print Management in Hybrid Environments

As workplaces move away from traditional desk-based models and become more varied, hybrid environments are increasingly the rule rather than the exception. That inevitably creates problems for IT, where standardization is typically the most efficient and reliable way to administer the organization’s hardware and software infrastructure.

However, standardizing your print management services can be difficult when your managed print environment is a kaleidoscope of printer makes and models interfacing with different operating systems, client devices, and users.

One of the biggest challenges to pain-free print management is user acceptance. Adopting a uniform printing software solution might be welcomed by the IT staff, but if it means your end users have to compromise functionality or jump through extra hoops, that solution can quickly turn counterproductive. Users who are frustrated or confused (or both) by printing will inevitably call the helpdesk. Instead of proactively handling the organization’s managed print environment, admins and support staff are stuck reacting to printer issues and support tickets.

 

Creating the Ideal Hybrid-Managed Print Environment

A hybrid-managed print solution should be easy to administer, transparent to the end user, and improve the print workflow—irrespective of front-of-house variables like OS, department, client type, or printer model. Ideally, it should do these four things:

  1. Allow an organization to streamline infrastructure without sacrificing functionality and security. 
  2. Enable admins to oversee and maintain their managed print environments from a single pane of glass. 
  3. Provide powerful print management services and advanced functionality without resulting in a lumbering Frankenstein of add-ons and third-party software.
  4. Extend printing capabilities to hybrid employees by offering an easy way to print to network printers instead of relying on vulnerable home office printers (nearly 66% of companies are worried that home office printers pose a risk to their security). 

Simply put, the perfect print management solution for today’s hybrid workforce unifies and streamlines the print environment while providing infinite scalability, incredible user-friendliness for admins and end users, and next-generation features like mobile and off-network printing.

 

The Solution: Serverless Print Management

Serverless print management software allows organizations to eliminate print servers from their managed print environments, removing the need to deploy, operate, maintain, and upgrade remote print infrastructure. At the same time, it integrates seamlessly with any existing printer fleet and many print management services, even in complex Citrix and VMware virtual environments, which allows for quick, smooth initial migrations followed by effortless administration from that point on.

All of this is possible with PrinterLogic.

PrinterLogic’s SaaS print management solution combines next-gen, centralized management with the proven reliability of direct IP printing. 

That means:

  • Admins escape the hassle of establishing every client–printer connection. And, unlike common alternatives to direct IP, PrinterLogic’s serverless platform eliminates print servers and removes their single points of failure.
  • Admins and authorized support staff can deploy printers and drivers according to criteria like Active Directory (AD), IP address range, and MAC addresses—without relying on GPOs or scripts
  • End users can install printers themselves through PrinterLogic’s Self-Service Installation Portal. Instead of choosing from long lists of printers, which increases the risk of incorrect installs, they can identify nearby printers using the optional floor plan maps and install them with just one click. This feature has reduced helpdesk calls by up to 95% for some organizations.

But how does serverless printing benefit IT teams and hybrid employees?

If your environment requires constant mobility and security, PrinterLogic offers various features that enhance the printing experience for hybrid employees, including:

Off-Network Printing: Empower hybrid employees to print to any network printer from the comfort of their home office, a cafe, or a hotel for later pick-up. Your print data doesn’t remain at rest in the cloud and stays encrypted until it is behind your organization’s firewall. This feature removes infrastructure costs like VPNs, hosting services, and external access portals. 

Mobile Printing: Enable users with any mobile device, regardless of OS, to print to authorized printers. There’s no client-side software to install, and it works with any new or legacy network printer. Mobile, BYOD, and guest users can print quickly, reliably, and easily to on-location printers no matter where they happen to be.

Secure Release Printing: Boost security with a two-step print-and-release workflow to ensure that end users are physically present to claim their jobs. Release options include CAC/PIV, badge or card readers, web browser, and ID/PIN entry at the control panel. In addition, PrinterLogic’s QR code release method allows for a secure, convenient pull printing release mechanism without investing in any dedicated print release infrastructure.

 

Get Stress-Free Print Management Free for 30 Days

Despite the nuances and complexities of hybrid environments, PrinterLogic removes the barriers that make it difficult for managed print environments to adapt. While realizing time and cost savings through their ability to eliminate print servers, our print software solutions empower end users, increase organizations’ flexibility, and equip them with a robust print management platform built for enterprises of all sizes.

To see firsthand how PrinterLogic can unify and enhance your hybrid print environment, request a demo for a free 30-day trial today.