Posted by Devin Anderson
If you’re one of the thousands of organizations using Citrix, you know what an incredible asset it is. You also know that Citrix printing and Citrix printer management aren’t always as seamless and straightforward as they ought to be. For admins, deploying and assigning the right printers to the right users in Citrix environments can be hit and miss, which is the last thing you want in mission-critical situations. For users, installing the right printers at the right time can be an exercise in frustration—especially if those users happen to roam during a session.
Thanks to its incredible flexibility and built-in support for Citrix printing, PrinterLogic serves as a Citrix print management solution that brings oversight, control and simplicity to even the largest and most intricate Citrix environments, ultimately benefitting the end user as well as IT and the service desk.
How, exactly? PrinterLogic can either supplement native Citrix printing capabilities or implement its own powerful feature set instead. Regardless of the method you choose, you’ll empower your users through self-service installation and automated proximity printing.
The first feature allows Citrix session users to view, select and install nearby printers quickly and intuitively. As has been proven in case study after case study, this leads to a drastic reduction in calls to the service desk asking for help with routine installations. The second feature automates printer installation on the basis of session users’ physical location, which can be determined by means of their MAC address, IP range or other factors. If the users move to a different floor or building during that session, PrinterLogic will automatically remove the previous printer and install the new one closest to them. Not only does this keep service desk calls to a minimum, it also avoids common Citrix printing complications with lingering or “ghost” printers.
PrinterLogic has the further ability to compress print jobs, reducing the heavy WAN traffic that virtual environments can create. If you’d prefer to simplify driver installation across the enterprise, you can opt to use PrinterLogic’s universal driver instead of potentially buggy manufacturer-issued drivers.
And, of course, unlike other Citrix printing solutions, PrinterLogic gives you access to its renowned Citrix printer management capabilities, such as bulk printer deployment, centralized administration through a single web-based portal, mass creation of printers, driver profile management, automatically setting the default printer, SNMP monitoring and comprehensive enterprise-wide auditing. You’ll even be able to assign printers without having to resort to group policy objects (GPOs) and scripts. When you manage printers or their drivers using PrinterLogic, the settings are automatically altered and updated on the Citrix servers.
For an overview of the different Citrix printing options in PrinterLogic, have a look at this page. It goes into more detail about using the Citrix universal driver, session printers and Citrix auto-created printers, plus the features that are available in all these different scenarios.