I don’t want to sound alarmist, but there’s a good chance your current corporate printing solution is working against you.
If your company is using print servers, your entire print infrastructure is vulnerable to single points of failure. For proof, you don’t need to look much further than the last time the print spooler crashed and users temporarily lost the ability to print.
It’s also no secret that print servers cause minor but irritating printing problems due to their poor driver management and unreliable deployments.
And if your company is using conventional direct IP provisioning, you’re probably pleased with the stability of your printing. But you’re also likely spending way too much time manually configuring every single printer connection whenever there’s a change.
All of these drawbacks end up hurting productivity. When a user doesn’t have instant access to the right printer, that amounts to lost time. When an admin has to wrestle with IT printing solutions instead of focusing on more important issues, that’s wasted resources. When users are ticked off at IT because they can’t print, that’s not great for morale.
Many companies end up living with this state of affairs because they assume enterprise printing is doomed to be imperfect. Standard corporate printing solutions have been a pain in the neck for so long that frustration and hassle just seem to go with the territory.
Fortunately, more and more organizations are becoming increasingly aware of next-generation alternatives.
An enterprise print-management solution that works with you
At PrinterLogic, since day one we’ve been focused on print management that ditches all the caveats and limitations of legacy IT printing solutions. That’s how our serverless print infrastructure came to be based on centrally managed direct-IP printing.
Centrally managed direct-IP printing takes the simple resiliency of one-to-one client–printer connections and combines it with powerful administrative control and oversight from a single pane of glass.
Because our solution doesn’t require print servers to negotiate printing, it’s platform agnostic and integrates seamlessly with any environment—even typically challenging Citrix and VMware virtual environments. And because it can be administered from one console, it makes remote management super easy in highly distributed environments.
Even better, it allows printers to be deployed to individual users or entire groups based on detailed criteria, yet it does away with another perennial print server downside: Group Policy Objects. So you can still configure precise deployments using Active Directory. You’re just no longer at the mercy of GPOs and scripts.
When your head is in the cloud
A lot of companies are migrating their infrastructure to the cloud. Naturally, they want to move their corporate printing solutions there as well. But as many discover, printing is a little trickier than spinning up a virtual print server. Why? Because now you’ve got a WAN connection between your client and that cloud server. If that WAN connection is interrupted, so is printing.
PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud), by contrast, retains all the benefits our centrally managed direct-IP printing. If there’s a break in the WAN connection for any reason, current users can still print as usual.
That has beneficial side effects. Because print jobs remain on the local network, printing is speedier with PrinterLogic SaaS than with ordinary cloud-based IT printing solutions. Print-related network traffic doesn’t congest the WAN connection and contribute to bottlenecks that can impact the performance of other cloud software. And printer management is as effortless as ever, because the convenient admin console doesn’t sacrifice functionality or oversight.
Fewer moving parts, more productivity
For all the unique advantages and added benefits of centrally managed direct-IP printing, PrinterLogic’s success is rooted in its ability to eliminate print servers. Removing print servers from the print environment brings increased print availability, more scalability and greater ease of management. By the same token, it means reduced downtime, fewer help-desk calls and less hardware and software to monitor, manage and migrate.
In short, that translates to more productivity for end users and admins alike. That’s an outcome borne out by real-world results. Tazergy, a Georgia-based MSP specializing in senior housing, found that PrinterLogic SaaS helped to shrink print-related help-desk tickets to nearly zero (read the case study here). And they certainly aren’t they the only PrinterLogic customer with that experience.
If you think the print environment might be holding back productivity in your company, there’s only one way to be sure. All it takes is a few seconds to sign up for a demo of PrinterLogic. That will get you full-featured access to our solution—and the experience of an efficient, productive print environment—completely free of charge for 30 days.