CASE STUDY
“Is this real life?” The City of Nashua Eliminates 50+ Helpdesk Tickets per Month with Vasion Print
Vasion Print makes everything more seamless. It just works.
-- Nate Lloyd, Technical Operations Manager, City of Nashua
The Numbers
140+
printers for 550 PCs
20%
reduction in helpdesk tickets
104
hours of IT time saved annually
<3 weeks
for implementation
The Summary
The City of Nashua’s IT department was fielding constant calls and interruptions because of faulty print servers. Their existing print management system caused frequent computer crashes and made the problem worse. When the City of Nashua switched to Vasion Print (formerly PrinterLogic), printer problems disappeared overnight. Now the helpdesk team no longer receives 50+ printer-related tickets each month, saving them over 100 hours of IT time each year.
The Customer: City of Nashua
Industry: Government Administration
Nashua, “the Gate City,” is the second largest city in New Hampshire, supporting a region of 175,000 people.
The Challenge
Replacing Glitchy Tools and Error-Prone Print Servers
The City of Nashua, New Hampshire was using virtual print servers to power printing for all of its local government departments.
It was a mess. As Technical Operations Manager Nate Lloyd explains, the servers constantly developed issues.
“When a server started having a problem, at first we would create a new print server and keep the old one. And then that one would start developing problems, too. The disk would fill up, which caused problems on its own,” he says.
Before signing on with Vasion Print, Nate and his team tried one of Vasion’s competitors, but that tool made things worse. A glitch made pop-ups appear randomly and crashed users’ PCs.
“At least 20% of our helpdesk calls were printer-related tickets caused by [the Vasion Print competitor] and our print servers,” Lloyd says.
“No matter how many times we updated to the latest version, it just didn’t work.”
The City of Nashua gets about 300 IT tickets each month. That means that over 50 tickets were related to preventable printer issues. Lloyd estimates that fixing printing issues took at least two hours of IT time each week—over 100 hours per year.
Spending that much time managing printing was frustrating, but the constant interruptions to the workflow made the problem even worse.
“People would just pick up the phone and call us without logging a ticket. If they can’t print, they need that fixed ASAP,” Lloyd adds. “We had to do something about it.”
“Problems could usually be fixed in less than five minutes, but the interruptions were constant. If you’re working on a project or fixing something else, it’s annoying to have to stop to fix a printing problem. But if you don’t, it will snowball.”
At least 20% of our helpdesk calls were printer-related tickets caused by [Vasion Print competitor] and our print servers. No matter how many times we updated to the latest version, it just didn’t work.
The Solution
Centrally Managed Direct IP Printing
When Nate Lloyd heard about Vasion Print, he hoped that centrally managed direct IP printing could be the solution to the City of Nashua’s server frustrations.
He was not disappointed.
To start, he used Vasion Print to import and convert printer information from their existing servers to the Vasion Print Admin Console. They were able to get the entire city government set up in less than three weeks.
“It was great because our end users didn’t see any change,” Lloyd says. “The process was better than I thought it would be.”
The switch to Vasion Print made an immediate impact on Lloyd and the rest of the IT team. From day one, they no longer had to worry about print-related computer crashes, and end users stopped calling multiple times a day to report printer problems.
“My reaction was: Is this real life?” he jokes. “We were able to get rid of all of the servers and [Vasion Print competitor] right away.”
We were able to get rid of all of the servers and [Vasion Print competitor] right away.
The City of Nashua uses an on-prem Active Directory. They’ve set up Vasion Print to automatically deploy printers based on users’ organizational units (OU). “That works flawlessly,” Lloyd adds. When they onboard a new employee, they no longer add printers to their devices manually. “They’re already in the group, so it’s there automatically.”
They can also update drivers automatically on all devices at once, exponentially reducing printer administration time. “It’s less time that we have to devote to worrying about printers and drivers, and the end user doesn’t have to wait to print,” Lloyd adds. “Vasion Print makes everything more seamless. It just works.”
The City of Nashua recently changed all of the printers and PCs in the assessing department. Thanks to Vasion Print, they were able to use OUs to get all of the printers up and running at once. “Without Vasion Print, we would have had to manually add printers to each machine.”
Vasion Print makes everything more seamless. It just works.
The Results
“Nothing breaks anymore.”
The City of Nashua IT department went from fielding 50+ printer tickets each month to virtually none—a 20% reduction in overall helpdesk tickets. When it comes to printing, “nothing breaks anymore,” Lloyd says. “We don’t have to field all of those calls all of the time. That’s been huge.”
Without these interruptions, they’ve had more time to focus on other important IT projects, including a new password software project, a new mobile data management solution, and upgrading PCs to Windows 11. “We have 550 PCs, so that was a huge undertaking. If we still had to deal with printer issues constantly, it would pull us away from those projects,” Lloyd says.
“Without Vasion Print, our day-to-day operations would be more stressful,” he concludes.