“With UniPrint, we were able to reduce the amount of client printers that servers have to manage which greatly increased the stability of our environment.”

– Roberto, Technical Team Lead – Operations, Partner Solutions

Partner Solutions Ensures Bulletproof Printing Service for Insurance Brokerages with UniPrint Infinity

The Company

Quebec-based Partner Solutions is the application solution services provider for medium and large insurance brokerages in Canada.

The company hosts specialized applications, such as brokerage management systems, on their Citrix server and distributes the services to its customers via VDI.

Partner Solutions has more than 3,000 users dispersed over 200 locations across Canada, with firms ranging from single-users to those with more than 1,000.

The Challenge

Reliable, easy-to-use printing services are important to Partner Solutions’ end users.

In addition to business documents and normal printing requirements, insurance brokers in Canada have the specific need of printing Motor Vehicle Liability Insurance Cards.

These are known as “pink cards,” which are cards that drivers must carry to show proof of car insurance.

Pink cards require an especially high-quality print job. If the print alignment is off by even a couple of millimeters, the card is considered invalid.

The critical nature of these print jobs means that users need a bulletproof printing solution that is both on-demand and highly accurate.

The brokerage locations that Partner Solutions serves use a wide mix of printer hardware from many different manufacturers, including HP, Konica Minolta, Xerox, Canon, Brother, etc.

The 200 brokerage offices throughout Canada represent a broad range of local printing environments.

Prior to coming online with Partner Solutions, many brokers used homegrown, self-hosted solutions, where they maintained the infrastructure internally with dedicated support staff.

Under Partner Solutions’ previous printing solution, all printers were installed with drivers directly on the servers, with customers having access to all of them.

Unfortunately, the large number of connected printers and all of their dissimilar drivers created server and stability issues, leading to frequent server crashes, a lack of reliability, and frustration for users.

“We’ve had people in Alberta log into an unstable printer that crashes and takes the whole server down,” lamented Joshua, Technical Team Lead – Infrastructure, Partner Solutions.

The company needed a enterprise printing solution for cloud hosting that was easy to implement, easy to manage and reliable for clients.

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The Solution

Partner Solutions first purchased UniPrint in 2007, then upgraded to the Infinity version in 2012.

UniPrint’s PDF-based Universal Print Driver technology negated the need to install multiple manufacturer printer drivers on the application server thereby eliminating all incompatibility issues.

Administrators only needed to manage one UniPrint print driver from a centralized location.

Together these UniPrint core features solved Partner Solutions’ issues with printer management and server stability.

“The best part for us is the ease of management, because we really don’t have to manage many of the client printers,” said Joshua.

“With UniPrint, we were able to greatly reduce the amount of printers that the server has to care about, and it has drastically increased the stability of our environment.”

Because UniPrint is printer vendor-agnostic, not only did it support all printers connected to Partner Solutions’ network, but also provided assurance that all new printers would be supported.

Since UniPrint is already set up on Partner Solutions’ servers, in order to add new users, the administrator only has to install the UniPrint Client software  on user machines, including mobile and tablet devices, and they are ready to print.

The Benefits

UniPrint Infinity has improved the performance of Partner Solutions’ printing application, reduced requirements for printer management, and helped solidify the company’s reputation as a provider of reliable, high quality hosted services.

“Printing is definitely important to our customers, and UniPrint has eliminated the difficulties of printing issues we had before, so much so that ease of printing is one of our major selling points. It’s featured in our marketing materials as one of the reasons to use our services,” added Joshua.

Clients using UniPrint Infinity are pleased with the service, especially those in Mac environments, who had reported having problems printing with several different devices.

UniPrint requires very little maintenance; Partner Solutions simply tests and updates the universal driver when needed.

Key Benefits Include:

• • Simplified printer management and improved server stability
  • Low maintenance requirements
  • Highly scalable as printers and users are added
  • Bullet-proof printing for the end user
  • Support from UniPrint’s team
  • Printer vendor-independent
  • Support for all client printing including BYOD, mobile and tablet printing

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