Posted by Devin Anderson
As enterprise printing begins to transition away from a decades-long reliance on print servers and all their associated demands, centralized printer management has grown in popularity and importance. Like any trend, though, it’s one that should be scrutinized carefully before jumping in with both feet. What exactly are the supposed benefits of centralized printer management software, and does it fulfill them in real-world scenarios?
At PrinterLogic, our approach to centralized print management is simple. It’s about visibility, control and ease of use. That’s why we designed a print management solution that gives you a single, intuitively clear window onto your entire enterprise print environment and places all available options right at your fingertips. This means you can:
- Create, edit and remove printers individually or in bulk: Even if the printers in question are half a world away, you can deploy and amend them through a common web-based admin page. What’s more, there’s no unusual labyrinthine management protocol to decipher. PrinterLogic’s printer management paradigm is as easy to grasp as expanding or collapsing device trees and clicking check boxes—yet it’s more full-featured and powerful than conventional print management solutions.
- Initiate dynamic deployments: Regardless of your preferred criteria—Active Directory user, group, container, hostname, IP range and more—PrinterLogic allows you to deploy printers to select users with the confidence of granular control but all the convenience of reliable automation. Here, too, centralized print management allows you to do this even in the most geographically distributed print environments. Just as amazingly, it does this without the need for troublesome scripts and group policy objects (GPOs)!
- Monitor and manage printer queues: Unlike print servers, PrinterLogic’s approach to print management is unified rather than fragmented. A stuck print job on a workstation anywhere in your organization can be purged from one central location.
- Audit the entire print environment: Who printed a 500-page single-sided document in color at 8pm last night? Which department is using disproportionate amounts of paper and toner? How do the organization’s printing habits this month measure up year on year? Centralized print management through PrinterLogic lets you answer questions like these thanks to handy macro- and micro-level auditing tools.
- Administer effectively and efficiently: Update drivers, change profile settings, launch custom configurations—in short, perform any and every kind of maintenance or modification involved in enterprise printing—throughout your print environment without having to leave your seat.
But it isn’t just the admin or service desk representative who benefits from the power and transparency of centralized print management. The end-user experiences advantages too. PrinterLogic’s printer management software empowers your end-users with a standard self-service installation portal that enables them to identify and install nearby printers—even in virtual environments like Citrix and VMware. With ordinary employees now able to play a small but effective role in print management, they experience the speed and satisfaction of addressing their own needs while reducing some of the chronic burden on IT.
So, as you can see, centralized print management is a trend worth following because it has the potential to bring all the above benefits. But it’s only through PrinterLogic that you can be sure of unlocking that potential in full. Contact us today for a demonstration or 30 day free trial to see these benefits for yourself.