Posted by Devin Anderson
Without network printing, chances are that we’d all have hardwired personal printers. From an end user’s point of view, that would probably be ideal. Printer and driver installation would be more straightforward. And they wouldn’t suffer nearly as many issues with reliability, speed and other network printing problems.
From a print management standpoint, however, personal printers would be a nightmare, especially in enterprise-scale organizations. The size of the printer fleet would balloon exponentially, and every management procedure would need to be carried out manually and individually. Which is why, for reasons of both time and cost, network printing still makes a lot of sense.
Unfortunately, network printing is often hamstrung by the WAN. In distributed environments that employ a centralized print server model, users at remote sites are dependent on local print jobs traveling across the WAN to the server and back again. Their preferred network printer can be slow to respond as a result, which can be utterly baffling when the network mechanics aren’t clear: Why is it taking so long for their job to execute on a printer that might only be a few feet away?
In virtual environments, users often encounter the same frustrations. They’ll initiate a print job from their client machine, but increased WAN usage—particularly with virtual solutions, which rely heavily on WAN connectivity—can create serious and prolonged bottlenecks that slow network printing. If the issue persists, those same users are likely to call the service desk and complain when their network printer is slow to respond, resulting in increased call volumes and overburdened support staff.
How can your organization avoid WAN bottlenecks while retaining (or even improving) your current level of print management? Better still, how can you combine the advantages of network printing with the convenience and reliability of personal printers?
PrinterLogic has developed a proven and cost-effective solution that meets all those demands. Our next-generation enterprise print management software leverages direct IP printing to establish one-to-one connections between clients and local printers—even in complex distributed and virtual environments like Citrix and VMware. When a user clicks “Print,” the behavior is exactly as they would expect: The job travels straight from their machine to the desired printer.
This actually serves two purposes:
- PrinterLogic reduces reliance on the WAN for network printing. That direct path gives print jobs a boost in speed as well as reliability because it removes the factors that cause slow network printing and other print-related issues when the WAN connection is interrupted.
- PrinterLogic frees up WAN bandwidth for other applications. Network printing can be a data-intensive activity. With print jobs no longer traveling across the WAN, it makes that vital and finite bandwidth available to other important data traffic.
With PrinterLogic, there’s also no need for WAN accelerators and other tools to ensure smooth network printing. Our software solution solves these WAN bottlenecks independently. In fact, it even has the ability to reduce print infrastructure massively by eliminating print servers throughout your entire organization.
At the same time, PrinterLogic brings greater ease to print management through its centralized administration console. You can add, change or remove printers as well as drivers anywhere in the organization from a single pane of glass. Its intuitive interface and powerful management features makes it possible for you to set up dynamic deployments without the need for scripts or GPOs or initiate mass system-wide changes like adjusting default printer settings simply by checking a box.
In about the time that your end users spend waiting each year for a network printer that’s slow to respond (TVID: 42F-3D4-7A3), you could implement PrinterLogic across your organization, eliminating WAN bottlenecks, slow network printing and downtime along with expensive, hard-to-maintain print infrastructure. Why wait any longer?