System Administrators – Do Printing Workarounds Really Work?

Print System Administration

Many of us system administrators are creative at coming up with methods to solve day to day technical challenges including printing issues in our organizations.

And why not?

After all, it is part of our job and value added to the company.

Case in point – many system administrators have told me they use workarounds to solve their Citrix printer issues, which lead me to wonder if those workarounds actually made their lives easier and provided enhanced user experience in the long term.

These days, many third-party printing solutions are available in the market.

When deciding whether to continue using your own method or deploying a third-party printing solution, it is crucial to consider a few things … or else we are not doing our job.

Do Printing Workaround Really Work?

Printer Driver Incompatibilities: In a small company with simple IT settings, printing workarounds may get the job done, but for larger organizations with a complex IT environment, workarounds may not solve all their printing issues.

For example, some drivers may only work with 32-bit or 64-bit software, while others just work with 16-bit.

Now let’s add the ongoing need to add new users, install new drivers, and add BYODs, and just imagine all the printer driver incompatibility issues you’ll be facing.

Remote Printing Problems: Remote users often can’t get their document to print, even if the print job seems to spool correctly.

More often than not, system administrators will not think it is a high priority problem if their remote users need to wait 20 minutes for their documents to be printed.

But all these small issues add up to loss of productivity and agony over time for both users and admins.

Interested in learning more about printing solutions? Check out this free whitepaper on remote site print servers!

Printer Mapping Problems: Another common problem users may come across is associated with printer mapping in the back end.

In this situation, users who are mobile, tend to work with different printers in various locations.

The issue here is that users usually end up having too many printers to choose from and do not know which one to use.

This then leads to them calling the IT team for a quick fix or workaround that takes time to solve.

Any user will tell you they lose productivity while waiting around for their Citrix printing problems to be fixed.

Daily Printer Maintenance: For any large organization that has a big user base, there will always be at least one printer that fails or breaks down daily.

Daily Citrix printing problems get in a user’s way, and yet the problems are too often overlooked.

These malfunctions can come from the printer driver, print queue, printer router, print server, you name it.

As a result of these printing issues, IT will end up having to remap their printers, test for incompatibilities, and even relearn different interfaces.

These are all important issues to consider when choosing between workarounds and third-party printing solutions.

The latter takes away the mundane manual process of the former, allows for centralized printer mapping, enables more reliable remote printing, simplifies printer driver management, enhances server stability, streamlines workflow, and saves everyone a lot of time.

You may want to test it out and compare it to your existing methods.