If only virtual print problems weren’t real print problems. But it doesn’t get much more real than when you have end users trying to print and they’re encountering error after error. That’s when the helpdesk calls come fast and furious, and your support team has to stop whatever they’re doing to deal with urgent server crashes, rogue drivers and other virtual printing problems.
And to make matters worse, there are many forms that those virtual printing problems can take:
- Printers that should be installed don’t appear in the virtual machine.
- An end user clicks “Print” in the VM but there is no corresponding response.
- The print job appears to print but doesn’t enter the queue.
- The job appears to enter the queue but isn’t executed by the printer.
- The job executes but pages, images and/or blocks of text are missing.
As in most other scenarios, virtual print drivers are usually the culprit in these instances. However, buggy or incompatible drivers can actually exacerbate matters and create troubleshooting roadblocks on account of printer redirection, which is the method that’s frequently used to provision printers into a virtual session. Printer redirection requires the client machine and the virtual server to be in perfect sync, and something as simple as a version mismatch or a slight difference in naming (such as a space) can cause printing to fail.
There are also more general issues with virtual printing that could apply to many print environments. These include poor driver and printer management, a lack of easy-to-use printer installation for end users, and over-reliance on the WAN connection in centralized setups.
For reasons of cost and simplicity, many organizations first try to make do with the basic native print capabilities of their virtual solution. When their virtual printing problems escalate to a point where they’re having a noticeable impact on productivity, it’s common for those organizations to look for dedicated virtual printing software as a way to stabilize and streamline their print environment.
Unfortunately, those virtual printing software solutions can make things even more difficult.
If the software doesn’t integrate fully and seamlessly with the virtual environment, it creates another moving part, another risk of incompatibility, another potential point of failure. If it only deals with the virtual printing process and not the management of virtual print drivers and printers, then it fails to address some of the root causes of virtual printing problems. And if it relies on traditional provisioning methods, then it can’t promise a next-generation solution to longstanding drawbacks.
That’s why PrinterLogic is different.
Our print management solution works uniquely and seamlessly alongside VDI environments like VMware and Citrix to simplify and enhance their native virtual printing capabilities. It brings unprecedented ease to print management through its intuitive centralized management console, which allows you to add, administer and remove printers as well as virtual print drivers anywhere in the organization from a single pane of glass. You can deploy printers to users without wrestling with GPOs and scripts and even set up speedy automated deployments based on Active Directory criteria like organizational unit (OU), group and IP address.
PrinterLogic uses proven direct IP printing to establish direct connections between clients and local printers, eliminating further longstanding virtual printing problems like unreliability and WAN dependency. And our popular self-service portal allows end users to identify and install nearby printers entirely on their own with a single click. That saves them and your support team a helpdesk call.
Unlike mere virtual printing software, the power and scalability of our solution enables your organization to eliminate its print servers too, so you can bid farewell to your high-maintenance print infrastructure at the same time as you’re waving goodbye to your virtual printing problems. What’s more, PrinterLogic now has a SaaS virtual printing solution called PrinterCloud, giving you a choice between a cloud-based or an on-premises implementation.