Printerlogic Vdi
Libby Cowen
I found out about Printer Logic at TechEd this year. If you are using Printer Logic, I would love to hear from you. How big is your environment? How many sites do you have and how many printers? Was it easy to justify the cost?
We to are looking at printerlogic. We have about 140 Printers and they have a Commercial Pack of 250 Manageable Print Queues. If you want the Advanced features you can get those in 50 Packs on top of the main pack. advanced will give you Mobile/Email Printing and secure Pull Printing. We will be setting up our Demo next week to test some of it out. I did like the sound of the reports they can do as you can find out what printers are being used and who is doing all the printing. they also said that you can do high availability at no cost with a standby server.
We just implemented Printer Installer by PrinterLogic and it is an excellent system. Our environment consists of only 150 printers but as the company grows printers become a bigger and bigger problem. We went from installing direct IP printers manually on each computer to using PrinterLogic. I was able to steer the department away from print server hell and the impossible GPO setup that goes with it. In our case, installing printers direct IP was less work and less trouble than having a print server but still inefficient. PrinterLogic eliminates the single point of failure and the expense of creating and maintaining multiple print servers. You also can forget about creating GPOs and you can forget about how to deploy all the right printers to all the right users at all the right times.
The first step for me was to add the drivers I was going to use into the driver repository. I added the 32bit and 64bit universal print drivers for Ricoh, HP, and Lexmark into the driver repository. I then created a setting profile for each driver. You can configure the driver settings however you want them to be configured on your endpoints. Remember to configure the hold print username to be the windows login name in order to avoid people not being able to hold print after the printers are deployed.
In my case I had to manually add 150 printers since they were all direct IP. If you have an existing print server they can all be imported into PrinterLogic from the server. When adding the printers I simply assigned them drivers from the driver repository and selected the setting profile I created.
Once all the printers are in Printer Installer. I created IP Range objects for each of our retail locations. I then assigned these IP range objects to the primary printer at each location. Now every computer at that location will get the primary printer installed automatically including laptops that walk onto the premise from the corporate offices.
For printers that are meant for individual computers, which were few, I deployed these printers using Printer Installer by just selecting the computer name from active directory. I personally avoid deploying printers by username because then every printer assigned to that user gets installed on every computer they login to. You can deploy printers by IP range, username, computer name, OU, and by group.
usbeef - thank you for that awesome review. I attended a presentation by Printer Logic last week at the Toshiba LEAD 2016 conference. Our situation is much like yours (almost eerily so). I am meeting with some PL reps next week and intend to brush up on their product before that.