How to Resolve the Greatest Pain Points in Enterprise Printing

As humans, our brains are hardwired to avoid pain. We have a natural urge to pull back our hand if it gets too close to a flame. We instinctively walk gingerly on our leg if it’s injured. We sometimes even go out of our way to avoid uncomfortable situations.

Which is why it’s kind of surprising that we continue to put up with so many constant pain points in enterprise printing. Legacy printing solutions like print servers were never perfect. But these days the pain they cause is more acute because the enterprise is evolving to leverage cloud and mobile trends. Printing solutions that can’t keep pace end up affecting morale, productivity and the bottom line.

As we’ll see, PrinterLogic’s serverless printing streamlines print management and future-proofs the enterprise print environment by eliminating print servers. But first let’s briefly revisit why and how print servers are responsible for causing so much headache.

Any IT professional who’s involved in print management can probably list a dozen pain points that they endure on a daily basis. Broadly speaking, though, there are three categories that have the biggest overall impact.

High printing costs: There are so many contributors to this issue that it would take several white papers to describe them all. One common contributor is end users printing unnecessary color jobs. Or sending jobs to the wrong printer. Or forgetting to claim jobs they’ve already printed. And then there’s the cost of all the management and support overhead for printer deployments, installations, print-server maintenance, troubleshooting and so on.

An overwhelmed IT support desk: Printer issues make up a disproportionate percentage of helpdesk tickets. When basic print management (e.g., printer deployments, driver updates) already takes up so much time, it’s easy for extra support requests to put IT in chronic damage-control mode. IT then takes a productivity hit, as do all the end users who are stuck waiting on resolutions.

Employee dissatisfaction: If end users are frustrated by printing problems, they don’t pin the blame on the printing solutions. They blame IT. That results in an adversarial “us versus them” mindset—a sense that their coworkers and the company’s technology is working against them when it should be empowering them. That’s not healthy for morale.

Through its serverless printing infrastructure, PrinterLogic creates a unique pairing of centralized management and direct IP printing. That gives it the ability to address all the factors that contribute to pain points in enterprise printing.

• Simplifies printing in virtual environments: Unlike printing solutions that want to force their own methods (with unpredictable results), PrinterLogic seamlessly enhances the native print functionality of VDI environments like Citrix and VMware.

• Increases security and reduces waste: PrinterLogic can automatically default printers to black and white after every print job. You can also set up enterprise-wide secure release printing to ensure that documents aren’t abandoned by end users and that they remain confidential. 

• Streamlines printer driver management and deployment: A common driver repository is just one more benefit of centralized management. Deploy, update or roll back drivers individually or in bulk. All from a single pane of glass.

• Prints from any mobile device to any network printer: A lot of IT departments are still trying to figure out how to implement intuitive, reliable printing from smartphones and BYOD devices. PrinterLogic’s mobile printing is the answer.

• Offers powerful reporting and alerting features: Visibility into the print environment doesn’t stop with deployments. PrinterLogic’s advanced reporting can email comprehensive periodic reports on print activity to decision makers.

• Eliminates print-related WAN traffic: Serverless printing using direct IP means that print jobs travel straight from the client to the printer. That keeps bandwidth-hungry print data on the local network.

• Gets rid of scripting and GPOs: PrinterLogic does away with the need for custom scripts and convoluted Group Policy configurations. Enjoy faster logons and easy-to-configure advanced deployments using Active Directory criteria.

It all comes down to eliminating print servers

By eliminating print servers, PrinterLogic simplifies tedious print management and cuts down on expensive print infrastructure. Just the potential ROI alone might be reason enough to migrate. But PrinterLogic’s ease of use and scalability are what make it ideal for organizations looking for permanent relief from enterprise printing pain points.

Navicent Health faced an especially challenging situation. This healthcare nonprofit had a distributed print environment that was complicated by a fleet of VMware thin clients and a Cerner EMR solution. Group Policy deployments only made things worse. The management team had to create dozens of printing sub-environments, and the helpdesk was deluged with support tickets. Talk about painful.

Serverless printing with PrinterLogic was the remedy. PrinterLogic streamlined deployments, driver updates and profile changes, which in turn drastically reduced the number of support tickets. And that led to PrinterLogic paying for itself in roughly seven months. Read the case study here.

No matter what printing solutions you’re currently using, and no matter how distributed or large your environment, PrinterLogic can help your organization kill the pain of enterprise printing. Best of all, the cure is instant. Sign up today for a free, 30-day demo of our serverless printing infrastructure and see how quickly it can turn pain into pleasure.