I was asked to write a post about the importance of delivering all output from users’ devices to destinations within the enterprise. My first thought was: "how hard can that really be?"
As I have worked at LRS for more than six years, I have gotten used to the products we offer and how easy it is to have a controlled but yet flexible printing environment. All print jobs in our office are handled and secured in our VPSX enterprise output management solution. Management is key for a working print solution, not only for the actual printing but also for auditing, disaster recovery, redirection of print jobs or driver management.
So, to understand the challenge, I had to start the other way round — from the perspective of a customer not familiar with what LRS can deliver.
For a global enterprise with many offices or manufacturing plants at various locations, bandwidth is always an issue. Who wants to send a print job first to the print server and then to the printer? Seems wasteful, especially when the printer is basically standing in the room next door. To offload traffic, it is more efficient to send the job directly to the printer, in a secure manner, and still have full control of what has been printed, at what time, and by whom.
Add to that the possibility to enable print policies, either by forcing users to only print in monochrome, in duplex, etc. Alternatively, one could take the gentle approach: provide user prompts that your company policy encourages users to print in a certain way while giving the users the possibility to override the policy for this particular print. After all, a cover page for a printed presentation does look nicer in color, doesn’t it?
Assuming we configure the system to only support direct printing, will it take a lot of work to change to printing through the VPSX print server? No — that is more or less done within seconds. By managing all printer queues in VPSX, you can change/add/delete any queue from the VPSX web interface. This allows you as a customer to enable not only direct print functionality but in fact all printer features and settings in one place.
Are you working from home and need to print on a printer at the office? Not a problem! With support for Internet Printing, enabling jobs to arrive from outside the corporate network is a standard feature of VPSX. software. Moreover, these print jobs are secured and verified, all without VPN!
Now imagine the original print data is sent in a format that the target printer cannot understand. How is it possible to print? One way would be to set up a separate printer queue with a driver that the printer understands. Unfortunately, more queues mean more administration and more frustrated users having to remember which queue to pick. A far easier way to solve this problem is to let VPSX software transform that print job into a suitable format. This can be done on the fly with no user interaction needed. VPSX knows what type of printer is on the other end and can therefore adjust the transformation accordingly.
Result? One queue for any number of printers. Simpler to use, simpler to maintain.
Perhaps you've heard your IT department yell “We spend too much time on updating drivers!” Then let us help. Printer driver management is usually a nightmare for companies using Windows print servers or even some established print solutions. Instead of relying on end users to add printer drivers and continually update them to the latest versions, LRS’ driver management tools let you install printer drivers automatically and interrogate the system on a regular basis to determine of anything has changed with the driver (modification to driver default preferences, new version loaded, etc.). This works with regular model-specific drivers as well as a universal printer driver (global print driver). When changes are noted, the system can update the workstation printer definition and refresh the driver.
You may be asking yourself: "how can I, as a customer, have full control of what has been printed?" With our auditing tool, it’s easy to gain access to proper audit data giving you an insight to who printed what, where and when.
LRS Enterprise Output Management gives you control and top of the line functionality without a masters in rocket science. After all, it’s just print, right?