As cloud-based solutions mature and become more suitable for enterprise-scale applications, organizations have started to look into cloud printing software that can handle the demands of fast-paced printing in large and varied environments.
Are all cloud print solutions up to the task? Not quite.
One of the first things these organizations discover is that there’s a big difference between enterprise cloud printing and cloud print management. Printing simply means that documents get relayed from a client device to a printer—basic print functionality, in other words. Print management is about much more than that. It has to do with things like how printers are deployed, how print queues are handled, how drivers are managed, and how end users install local printers. Most cloud print solutions focus on printing at the expense of print management.
At PrinterLogic, we’ve found that swapping those priorities ends up improving both of them. By focusing on effortless, intelligent, feature-rich print management, we’re able to deliver equally effortless, intelligent, feature-rich printing across any environment, regardless of how complex, distributed or unconventional it happens to be. That’s as true for our on-premises print management solution as it is for our enterprise cloud printing solution, PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud). And that’s why we call it next-generation.
PrinterLogic SaaS enables enterprise cloud printing to make a massive leap forward by providing all the advantages of the cloud while addressing some of the biggest shortcomings of cloud-based printing solutions. Compatibility restricted to specific hardware? Poor driver management and other driver-related hiccups? Fundamental WAN vulnerabilities? All of those longstanding issues with cloud print solutions are solved in PrinterLogic SaaS.
Let’s take WAN vulnerabilities as an example. Like its acclaimed on-premises counterpart, PrinterLogic SaaS leverages proven direct IP printing, which creates one-to-one connections between clients and printers. Traditionally, however, direct IP connections, though preferred by admins on account of their simplicity and stability, can be an absolute nightmare to manage in large organizations. That’s where PrinterLogic SaaS’s strength as a cloud print management solution comes in. PrinterLogic SaaS brings centralized, convenient, cloud-style management to direct IP printing, so you can deploy, administer and remove printers throughout the organization from a single pane of glass—quickly and easily.
But how exactly does that relate to the WAN? Well, the straight client-to-printer connections of direct IP printing means that your enterprise cloud printing solution isn’t wholly reliant on WAN connectivity. If there’s a WAN outage, PrinterLogic SaaS users can continue printing as usual without downtime. Print jobs are faster, too, because they don’t have to get routed to the cloud server.
PrinterLogic SaaS’s unique emphasis on powerful, easy-to-use cloud print management extends to routine installations. If an end user hasn’t automatically received a printer (which is incredibly easy to set up in PrinterLogic SaaS—all without GPOs or scripts), they can simply visit the self-service installation portal, choose their printer from a visual floorplan map, and click on it. That will instantly install the printer and any necessary drivers.
Another next-generation advantage of PrinterLogic SaaS over other cloud print solutions is its extensibility. Wouldn’t it be nice to have company-wide Mobile Printing capabilities, regardless of the mobile device or printer? How about Secure Pull Printing for every employee? Advanced macro- and micro-level reporting and auditing? All of that is not only possible but easy to implement, thanks to the combination of enterprise cloud printing and cloud print management of PrinterLogic SaaS.