“I think the biggest bang for our buck is that there is only one single UniPrint printer that we need to deal with.”

– Melvin Goodyear, Senior Infrastructure Analyst, Newfoundland Power Inc.

UniPrint Solution Energizes Newfoundland Power Inc.

The Company

Since 1855, Newfoundland Power Inc. and its predecessor companies have produced and sold electricity throughout Newfoundland, a maritime province on the Canadian eastern seaboard.

The investor-owned, government-regulated company operates an integrated generation, transmission and distribution system, serving over 230 000 customers and maintaining approximately 11 000 kilometres of transmission and distribution lines.

The Challenge

Winner of the Canadian Information Productivity Award of Excellence for Customer Care, Newfoundland Power has made major investments to upgrade its infrastructure and has implemented a strict maintenance program.

To deliver superior customer service, its field personnel need fast and reliable printing of service orders and outage tickets. Its finance department also relies heavily on printing for records and invoices.

Printing in its Citrix environment was a major challenge for the company. With so many different client printers on the company’s network, it was a constant and costly struggle for administrators to keep everything operating.

“Between local and remote users, we had countless numbers of different printers, which produced all kinds of conflicts and issues,” says Melvin Goodyear, Senior Infrastructure Analyst at Newfoundland Power.

“You could literally spend days trying to figure why a client printer was not auto-creating or why a print job was not coming out right. It was frustrating for everyone.”

Newfoundland Power needed a reliable printing solution that would make printing and administration easy and efficient.

Free e-book: Remote Site Print Servers: The Last Stand for Onsite Servers?

The Solution

Newfoundland Power’s IT people did a lot of research via the Internet, technical papers, and referrals.

After investigating several products, they decided that UniPrint’s printing solution was a perfect fit based on its performance, convenience, price, and reputation.

Residing on Citrix Servers, the UniPrint universal printer driver eliminates the need for multiple manufacturers” printer drivers, thereby eliminating printer driver incompatibility issues.

By converting print jobs into Portable Document Format (PDF), bandwidth is significantly conserved and server stability vastly improved.

The result is a user-friendly network that requires almost no printer-related administration.

“We were getting documents coming out that looked like they were in Japanese characters,” Goodyear remembers.

“When I moved the application to a Citrix server using UniPrint, it rectified a lot of issues. And our users like to keep things simple, so when we tell them to go ‘file – print’ and they see only one printer, it makes things easier.”

The Benefits

Newfoundland Power wanted a solution that was easy to install, easy to manage, cost-effective, and ultimately reliable.

UniPrint delivered exactly what the company needed and more:

• Much more efficient printing with one universal driver
• Reduced number of printing-related support issues
• Simple installation
• Ease of use at the client level
• Increased productivity
• Converts print jobs into PDF for e-mailing, archiving and printing
• Support from UniPrint’s dedicated, knowledgeable team
• A great product at a very affordable price

PDF generation is a particularly important feature for the company. Before, printing and transferring larger files put a strain on the network, consumed huge bandwidth, and caused a lot of downtime.

With those files converted to smaller PDFs, they are faster to print, e-mail, or download and print documents can also be saved and e-mailed instantly.