Posted by Devin Anderson
Tired of dealing with Windows Server 2012 print management and all the headache the goes along with enterprise print servers? You’re far from being the only one. Widespread dissatisfaction with traditional print management solutions like print servers has led an increasing number of organizations to discover PrinterLogic’s next-generation enterprise print management solution, which delivers unprecedented ease of use with powerful administrative capabilities and a vastly reduced infrastructure footprint.
Before we look at PrinterLogic in more detail, let’s first consider all the work that goes into print management with Windows Server 2012. To begin with, there’s the enterprise print servers themselves. These need to be purchased, housed, maintained, rebooted, upgraded and ultimately replaced. All of that requires time, expense and effort above and beyond day-to-day Server 2012 print management and all the administrative oversight that entails.
Part of that day-to-day print management of Server 2012 includes tasks like printer deployment. This often requires finicky group policy objects (GPOs) or custom-made scripts in order to get the right printers to the right users, and even those methods aren’t always reliable. Nor do they provide both the precision and the flexibility you need in a dynamic print environment. Printer and driver management leaves a lot to be desired too.
On the end-user side of things, there’s printer installation. Sometimes end users will have the ability to install printers themselves, but to do so they often have to choose blindly from a pool of printers with long and confusing names, and then they have to correctly map that printer (not an easy process for newbies) and hope that the correct drivers are available and install correctly. Print management in Server 2012 hasn’t made the process much easier compared to earlier versions of Windows Server.
Most of the time, the printer installation process is so convoluted, intentionally restricted or prone to errors that end users have to call the service desk and ask for help. That eats up the support staff’s valuable time and prevents them from concentrating on more pressing issues. Like restarting the print server, for example, after the spooler has crashed due to a driver conflict.
And this isn’t a deliberately grim illustration of Server 2012 print management. For many organizations that continue to rely on enterprise print servers, this is the daily reality they face. As one of our customers once mildly put it: “Print server management is no cakewalk.”
PrinterLogic’s unique, forward-thinking approach to enterprise print management changes all that. With PrinterLogic, you have the ability to eliminate your enterprise print servers completely and replace all of them with a single instance of our infinitely scalable print management software—even in large, geographically distributed organizations. All that cost and hassle of purchasing, maintaining and replacing print servers? It disappears.
And, unlike print management in Server 2012, PrinterLogic’s intuitive management console gives you access to and control over your entire print environment from a single pane of glass. Making changes to one or more printers is as simple as a few clicks, and it’s possible to deploy printers individually or en masse, manually or automatically, without ever having to bother with GPOs.
Plus PrinterLogic can be easily enhanced with additional functionality to suit your organization’s print environment. Are you considering Mobile and BYOD printing? Secure printing? Advanced print auditing? Seamless integration into your existing (or future) Citrix or VMware environment? In stark contrast to Server 2012’s print management, PrinterLogic can deliver all those features without resorting to third-party solutions.
With PrinterLogic, you can rid yourself of the headache of enterprise print servers and transform your print management into a streamlined, cost-effective, feature-rich platform that works for you, not against you.