Printing continues to be a mission-critical capability in modern workplaces, even as those workplaces have fundamentally changed in line with wider social and technological trends. Today, mobile and BYOD devices are much more ubiquitous and far more capable than they were ten years ago, and employees’ attitudes have shifted toward what they expect from IT—something that applies to both support and infrastructure. As a result, and despite the printing process itself being a constant over the decades, the qualities and features that organizations of any size should look for in their print-management software have evolved.
The catch is that most print-management solutions haven’t evolved accordingly.
In the enterprise, it’s still common to see print servers forming the backbone of the print infrastructure. Sure, they’re single points of failure, they require GPOs and rights management for most deployments, their driver management fluctuates between poor and terrible, and they offer little in the way of advanced functionality like mobile printing. Yes, they’re inefficient, frustrating, unreliable, full of limitations and compromises. But they’re the status quo, and the familiarity of the status quo is what imbues it with staying power in the face of change.
Bearing that in mind, maybe it’s time to reassess what organizations should look for in their print-management software.
Is it designed for today and tomorrow?
One of the most important characteristics of a print-management solution is that it should meet the needs of your current environment while also providing a platform that’s versatile enough to anticipate future changes and challenges. Traditional print-management paradigms like print servers just aren’t up to that task.
PrinterLogic’s serverless print-management software integrates seamlessly into your existing print environment with a minimal footprint (or zero footprint in the case of our PrinterCloud SaaS solution) and almost effortless migration. Our migration tool actually takes the print queues, printer objects, profiles and drivers on your current print servers and imports them quickly and smoothly into PrinterLogic. That means you can be up and running with a PrinterLogic deployment in record time with no interruption to end users’ print activity.
Once PrinterLogic is implemented, you can continue running our print-management software alongside your old print servers. Or, better still, you can eliminate your print servers altogether, reducing infrastructure, costs of maintenance and administrative overhead in the process. PrinterLogic’s impressive scalability then allows your organization to grow without the need to add the infrastructure and personnel required by conventional print-management solutions.
Does it natively support advanced features?
When organizations want to add functionality such as print reporting or pull printing, they typically resort to discrete third-party solutions. This is how print environments become a high-maintenance patchwork of software that’s difficult to manage and often requires hacks and workarounds to function as a cohesive whole.
PrinterLogic natively supports optional features that include BYOD and guest printing, secure pull printing, mobile printing and print auditing. Unlike layered or bolt-on solutions, these are more like seamless extensions of PrinterLogic’s core functionality. They introduce premium features to the print environment without the usual investment of administrative time and cost.
For example, with mobile printing, users can print natively from iOS and Android smartphones and tablets to any network printer—including legacy devices—without the need to provision or install any client-side software. They can then easily view and release jobs to the most convenient printer through the PrinterLogic Print Release App. Meanwhile, guests and BYOD users can use the convenient email-to-print capabilities in PrinterLogic’s mobile printing to send print jobs to local printers, regardless of whether they’re on- or off-network.
Will it simplify print management?
Instead of streamlining print management, many solutions add unnecessary complexity to the print environment. Our serverless solution instead grew out of the idea that comprehensive control and simplicity aren’t mutually exclusive, and that the most valuable solutions empower admins and end users alike to get their jobs done.
On the admin side of things, PrinterLogic provides a centralized management console that can be used to monitor and administer the entire print environment from a single pane of glass. Through this console, admins can manage drivers across the organization, adjust default settings with granular precision and deploy printers to individuals or whole groups of users. PrinterLogic also eliminates the need for GPOs and scripts, so deployments can be carried out with pinpoint accuracy but without the usual configuration headaches.
The end-user experience is just as hassle-free. PrinterLogic’s self-service installation portal is a web-based tool that enables end users to identify and install nearby printers—along with any associated drivers—with a single click. There’s no need for them to call the help desk or waste time digging through device trees to map their own printers. This is just one reason why Strata IT (read the case study here) as well as other managed service providers (MSPs) have found PrinterLogic to be unique among print-management solutions in terms of its time- and cost-saving potential.
Want to gain a better understanding of how PrinterLogic is the single answer to what to look for in print-management software? Just sign up for and download a free trial of our serverless enterprise printing solution to test it in your print environment for 30 days.