Enterprise printer management has traditionally taken one of three forms: a centralized print server, distributed print servers, or direct IP printing. Unfortunately, as many IT professionals already know, none of those legacy architectures is ideal. Here’s a quick summary of how those printer management setups look in real-world implementations and how they fall short.
- Centralized print server: One print server is responsible for the entire organization’s printing needs. This keeps infrastructure costs down and reduces some printer management overhead, but it creates a single point of failure for the entire organization. It also generates increased amounts of bandwidth-sapping WAN traffic between remote sites and the central print server.
- Distributed print servers: With a print server at every branch, this avoids the risks of a single point of failure, but it drives up infrastructure and operation costs significantly. From an enterprise printer management standpoint, it’s far more difficult to administer. And yet, as with a centralized print server, it still requires complex scripting and group policy objects (GPOs) for deployment and installation.
- Direct IP printing: While known for its stability and reliability in demanding print environments, direct IP printing is equally known for its tedious, time-consuming printer management. To perform basic administrative tasks like installing printers or updating drivers, IT admins usually have to log into each workstation separately, and end users are almost wholly reliant on the service desk to make changes and new installations.
PrinterLogic’s next-generation printer management software does something remarkable: It takes the strengths of all these legacy architectures and combines them, resulting in a single enterprise printer management solution that’s so versatile, robust and intuitive that it can be comfortably deployed in any print environment. It’s powerful enough to eliminate print servers while providing even more functionality, intelligent enough to simplify printer management while giving you more control, and stable enough to allow your end users to keep printing normally in the event of a server outage.
Compared to the shortcomings of the legacy architectures listed above, here’s how PrinterLogic’s enterprise printer management solution stacks up:
- Centralized management: Deploy and delete printers, update drivers, or edit profiles from a single pane of glass anywhere in the organization. Whether you’re administering a single printer or making sweeping changes to the whole fleet, almost everything you need to do in terms of printer management can be accomplished in a few clicks.
- Seamless integration with VDIs and EHR systems: Printer management is notoriously challenging in environments that rely on virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions like VMware and Citrix or electronic health record (EHR) systems like Epic or MEDITECH. PrinterLogic’s printer management software brings an unprecedented level of control and reliability to the environments, yet it integrates so smoothly and seamlessly that you’d think it was a native solution.
- Mobile/BYOD and Secure Printing: PrinterLogic makes it incredibly easy to enhance your print environment with added functionality. Our Mobile Printing solution enables you to provide your mobile/BYOD employees and guests with easy-to-use printing functionality that can work with any printer. And our Pull Printing solution introduces convenient security-minded features like release printing, which are so easy to use that end users will gladly make tighter security part of their workflow.
And that only names a few. With PrinterLogic, you can also empower your end usersthrough our unique self-service installation portal and even do away with scripting and convoluted GPOs when assigning printers. No other printer management solution for enterprise businesses really comes close to its feature set, ease of use, cost-effectiveness or speed of deployment.