Posted by Brian Wistisen
On an enterprise scale, printer installation hang-ups cause significant losses in productivity and serious burdens on IT support teams. While these issues have a clear and direct impact on the organization’s bottom line, they also detract from more important—and potentially more profitable—initiatives in the organization. That’s why we say that suboptimal print management practices can cost an organization twice over.
Thanks to PrinterLogic’s efficient centralized print-management approach, organizations can streamline printer installations, reduce printing downtime, and access advanced features like mobile and pull printing.
Here are some common printer-installation woes and ways in which PrinterLogic’s enterprise print-management software addresses them.
Wrong default printer: One of the most common printer installation problems occurs when jobs are sent to the wrong printer. Fixing this is usually a matter of selecting the desired printer and making it the default again. But if you employ a print server, it’s not uncommon for this setting to revert to the wrong default device every time the user logs in.
Inability to print: Printer installations can result in the user not being able to print at all. When print functionality is lost, it’s often a driver issue. The selected driver may not be compatible with the printer itself, or the OS on the client workstation. This happens when a 64-bit driver is paired with a 32-bit system, or when the driver wasn’t deployed correctly in the first place. There might also be a print job stuck in the queue preventing the new jobs from printing.
Cloud/mobile printing difficulties: Although the symptoms of mobile or cloud printer installation problems resemble their hardwired counterparts, the root causes are different. Mobile and cloud printing solutions often involve more back-end steps and layers of abstraction to achieve the same results. This can result in users not being able to “see” and select the desired device among the available destination printers. Some popular cloud-printing solutions also have limited device compatibility, which prevents printer installation before it even begins.
Thanks to PrinterLogic’s unique combination of direct-IP printing and centralized management, you can avoid printer installation problems like these—even in challenging Citrix environments.
Here’s how:
- Centralized printer management: Using PrinterLogic’s admin console, you can select the default printer for any computer by simply clicking a checkbox. You can set the default printer for the first printer installation, each time the user logs on, or by the user’s current location. No scripts or group policy objects (GPOs) necessary.
- Automatic driver deployment and conflict prevention: Through the same central console, it’s possible to deploy drivers to end users automatically—ensuring that the right driver for the right printer always gets to the right user. With PrinterLogic Web Stack (formerly Printer Installer) or PrinterLogic SaaS (formerly PrinterCloud), you can maintain a central driver repository so all client devices have access to the same pool of drivers. That makes printer installation a far more reliable process.
- Native BYOD/mobile printing: PrinterLogic offers a dedicated mobile printing solution that bypasses the frequent causes of printer installation problems for mobile and BYOD users. Users get immediate, straightforward printing from any mobile device to any authorized printer—all without the need for client-side software.
By design, PrinterLogic Web Stack and PrinterLogic SaaS eliminate persistent printer installation issues in the same way that they completely eliminate the need for print servers. This streamlines every aspect of enterprise print management for administrators and support staff. Their intuitive self-service printer installation portal even empowers end users with the ability to locate, identify and install printers entirely by themselves without having to call the help desk for assistance.
To put an end to printer-installation problems in your organization and see how incredible centralized printer management with direct IP can be, request a free demo of PrinterLogic Web Stack or PrinterLogic SaaS. You can test their features for 30 days and discover their cost-effective, time-saving benefits for yourself.