shine_victim Posted November 1, 2016 Share Posted November 1, 2016 Hi all, Very quick one for the Neowiners. What printing solutions do you guys use in the work place? How do you find it? Would you recommend them? Currently we have 2 print servers (one for HP printer drivers and one for non-HP printer drivers). A tactic which I employed to find print drivers which were causing havoc within our Citrix environment. Our print servers are hosted in (Belfast) HQ with 6 remote sites connecting across an MPLS network. Our printing infrastructure is pretty steady now with users living with sluggish speeds on remote sites and the odd driver causing issues on the non-HP print server but the amount of printers in the offices is ridiculous. In Belfast alone we have a pretty contained office across 2 floors yet we have roughly 40 printers to server 150 users. In my eyes this is a pain in the pooper. Managing inks/toners, mechanical faults, rental costs for some units etc. Ultimately I would like to take a proposal forward to the business to get sign off on a solution which would: Reduce the need for so many printers There are plenty of locations where we could have print areas rather than printers at the end of most tables Keep centralised management for all printers and drivers (if applicable) across all sites Enable users to secure print on any available printer using RFID tags or a PIN We would have a lot of users who roam from site to site As everyone will be away there are a plethora of solutions out there and I will be investigating as many as possible but thought I would reach out to the real world! Thanks for your time guys! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sc302 Veteran Posted November 1, 2016 Veteran Share Posted November 1, 2016 Citrix should utilize screwdrivers or uniprint universal printers. This relies on the client drivers to print...it fixes a lot of issues with citrix printing (just about all of them). No printers to manage in the citrix/terminal services environments, everything goes back to the local workstation and what printers they have...don't have to worry about mismatched driver versions, don't have to worry about having the right driver loaded on the citrix servers, don't have to worry about remote users trying to print to their local printers and what drivers they have. It really makes life so much easier. Each site should have its own print server and users should be utilizing that for printing....sending the print job in raw from the client to the remote print server back to the local printer and you wonder why it is slow? A 1MB file could be 1GB in raw format. You should be able to view all print servers fairly easily esp if you use rdcman. If not I believe you can group them in windows server manager. If you have some sort of central management, you can be alerted when they run out of supplies or out of paper (don't know why you would want to). Have an inventory of toner, when you run low replace the inventory. This will require some manual feed back from the people who manage the inventory. Not everything can be automated. You can secure the printers if the printers have the capability to secure. Here is a solution to manage auth https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/products/details/software/output-management/uniflow Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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