**Originally posted on July 25, 2017**
Enterprise print management would be a lot simpler if it just involved printers. Unfortunately, they’re just one piece of the elaborate puzzle. One of the main reasons for IT headaches is printer driver management.
It’s true, especially when you’re left dealing with a diverse printer fleet and so many individual drivers you start seeing red. It’s even more problematic with print servers at the helm.
Here’s why.
Problems With Printer Driver Management
What are some of the most common problems associated with printer driver management? They include but aren’t limited to things like:
- Driver confusion and incompatibility (e.g., 32- and 64-bit)
- Poorly coded manufacturer drivers versus limited universal printer driver functionality
- Difficulty rolling back buggy driver updates
- Improper driver deployments due to software or user error
- Decreased performance from large driver repositories
- Additional printer driver management hassles in Citrix and VMware environments
Some organizations invest in dedicated printer driver management software to help bring some order to this chaos. More often than not, they’re one-trick solutions that are more trouble than they’re worth. They fail to integrate fully and seamlessly with the existing print environment and tend to have uncommon approaches to printer driver management that take features away from you and your users.
Spooler vulnerabilities are a large contributor to stressful driver management. Admins are still constantly searching for new workarounds that don’t compromise security. Disabled spoolers, fixing prompts without disabling security patches, and a myriad of reinstallations just about had everyone throwing the towel in. And the post-PrintNightmare vulnerabilities keep rolling in.
How To Address These Printer Driver Management Issues
PrinterLogic’s next-generation print solution changes the whole experience of printer driver management. Even in challenging retail, healthcare, and financial print environments with many locations, our cloud-native software is a comprehensive, cross-platform, and universal print management solution. It’s completely printer-agnostic, saving you from replacing older printers that still work perfectly fine.
The biggest takeaway is you eliminate all of your print servers.
You read that right. ALL of them.
We replace your print servers with an on-prem or built-in-the-cloud solution that’s infinitely scalable and enables you to use a single interface as your dedicated printer and driver management software. From there, you can deploy, manage, and update drivers anywhere in the organization with just a few clicks.
Start Simplifying Your Enterprise’s Printer Driver Management
As with printer management, printer driver management with PrinterLogic is easier, more robust, and feature-rich.
You know those 32- and 64-bit conflicts that bring print spoolers to their knees?
Those become a non-issue.
Our enterprise printer driver management feature allows you to maintain a single driver repository with 32- and 64-bit versions side by side but without the potential for crash-causing mix-ups. And our driver management software doesn’t suffer a performance hit when you need to maintain large repositories.
It’s also easy to revert drivers to previous versions if one of them winds up causing trouble. Rollbacks can be carried out for specific users or entire groups with zero hassle. In turn, you can avoid compatibility issues and be confident that deployments are accurate and efficient around the clock.
Tired of working with individual manufacturer drivers?
If you prefer, you can print to a universal driver instead of dealing with individual manufacturer drivers. You don’t have to worry about dips in performance, either. You can set a wide variety of default printer profile options (e.g., dpi, paper tray, black and white) with the same ease as using our printer driver management software with model-specific drivers. For more flexibility, you can create default settings for a one-time log-on or set them on a recurring basis.
In short, printer driver management is yesterday’s struggle. By going serverless, it can be stable, effortless, and more versatile.