For about 10 years now, the popularity of Chromebooks has seen a steady increase—not just in the K-12 educational sector (although they have been pretty dominant there) but also in workplaces where Chromebooks’ unique mix of affordability, easy management, and ultra-portability checks all the right boxes.
Yet, despite all their benefits, Chromebook printing is one of the issues that led to hiccups in their adoption. A minimalist, cloud-centric operating system like ChromeOS just wasn’t designed for most printers and traditional enterprise printing solutions.
Life after Google Cloud Print
Many moons ago, organizations turned to solutions like Google Cloud Print to act as middleware between their existing print infrastructure and their Chromebooks.
And with reason.
It met their basic printing needs, but it wasn’t equipped to meet enterprise-level demands. After its deprecation in January 2021, organizations were left without a solution to their Chromebook printing problems. However, this motivated software companies to engineer their own Chromebook printing solutions that cater to larger corporations.
With an abundance of solutions at your fingertips, it’s easy to be overwhelmed. But few offer a true SaaS enterprise print management solution that changes the way Chromebooks interact with your printer fleet and simplifies the end user experience at the same time.
How PrinterLogic simplifies Chromebook printing
Unlike many conventional enterprise printing solutions, PrinterLogic prioritizes seamless integration and flexibility of deployment over commandeering functionality. This means it acts as a crucial enhancement to Chromebook printing rather than a straight-up alternative to Google Cloud Print—although it’s certainly powerful and full-featured enough to be implemented in that way too.
As you’d expect from a next-generation Chromebook printing solution, there’s no client-side software or printer-side software to install.
That means Chromebook users can open a machine for the very first time and start printing to an authorized printer right away without resorting to calling the helpdesk.
Plus, PrinterLogic supports any network printer—including legacy devices—removing the need to buy new printers or specific models that are Google Cloud Print-compatible. You can designate any network printer for Chromebook printing with an ease of configuration that is simply unprecedented in print management.
Secure printing features with Chromebooks
Alongside this ease of administration and use, PrinterLogic provides admins with a degree of centralized oversight and control that legacy printing solutions can’t match.
For example, using PrinterLogic’s centralized console, you can specify which printers users can print to—yet you can do so without resorting to the Group Policy Objects (GPOs) and scripts that you’ve traditionally been forced to rely on. Deployments take just a few clicks.
PrinterLogic’s optional Secure Release Printing method also adds a security aspect to Chromebook printing. When Chromebook users print, their print job is held until they specifically choose to execute it on their desired printer. In addition to being more convenient for highly mobile Chromebook users who rarely print to the same printer twice, this keeps jobs from being left exposed in the output tray—one of the leading causes of internal theft.
Another option that plays into secure printing is the ability to automatically delete jobs that were not released using this method. You can simply set specific time periods (i.e. every 24 hours, every week, etc.) to delete print jobs being held in queue.
Increasing print availability for Chromebooks
If PrinterLogic stopped at increased ease of management and enhanced secure printing capabilities, that might be enough for some organizations. But our on-prem and cloud-native enterprise printing solutions also ensure a highly available printing infrastructure that can withstand enterprise-scale challenges.
In a nutshell, when your users are ready to print, your print infrastructure is too.
With that in mind, we have two Chromebook-related white papers that are worth a read.
This one focuses on K-12 environments but has useful information on print-server bottlenecks and other Chromebook-printing issues that apply to enterprise environments.
And this one examines Chromebook printing more generally. It highlights the compromises demanded by conventional enterprise printing solutions that can negate the benefits of Chromebook deployments—and how PrinterLogic can help.
Or maybe you’re a hands-on type of person.
We get that.
Rather than hearing about our enterprise Chromebook printing solution, you can just try it out in your environment.
Get PrinterLogic and its complete feature set free for 30 days.