{"id":1513,"date":"2017-05-18T13:29:49","date_gmt":"2017-05-18T17:29:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uniprint.net\/?p=1513\/"},"modified":"2026-07-03T10:43:57","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T14:43:57","slug":"user-stories-american-red-cross","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uniprint.net\/en\/user-stories-american-red-cross\/","title":{"rendered":"User Stories: Lead Solutions Architect at ARC Improves IT Workflow"},"content":{"rendered":"
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What is your job role and your responsibilities at the American Red Cross?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My name is Adam Flowers, and I am a lead solutions architect here at the American Red Cross<\/a>. The team that I am on is called End User Technologies Solutions, which is the architect or engineering level for the EUS group which is desktop support or service desk support.<\/p>\n

Being on the IT team, I am tasked with IT support for a multitude of different organizations and end user classifications. I support full-time employees, part-time employees, and the volunteer staff as well.<\/p>\n

Can you describe your IT printing environment?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our IT platform consists of a mix of virtual and physical desktops running in VWware Horizon view environment.<\/p>\n

Most of our IT workforce does work from home. Having so many organizations under the Red Cross umbrella, of course the humanitarian aid or donor, they’re not at facilities. They’re at chapters or sites across the nation, and then other pockets can work from home.<\/p>\n

In total, we have over 306 plus remote locations.<\/p>\n

No matter whether our staff are on-site at a chapter, at a disaster or working from home, they need to be able to access their data, their resources, the applications that are needed to perform their job, so the mix of set-ups or configurations that we deal with is very diverse.<\/p>\n

What types of print-related issues and challenges were you facing in your specific role?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We have such a diverse printing environment – so many different printer models, many different set-ups, and of course we had home users that had wireless printers in their homes or USB attached printers out there.<\/p>\n

But one thing that we had seen before is print driver compatibility problems<\/a>. Getting print drivers into the virtual environment for those printers to be functional was always a challenge. We couldn\u2019t support hundreds or thousands of different models that we had in our environment and combat a compatibility issue.<\/p>\n

We knew that we needed to have a secure printing solution<\/a> that used a print driver redirection technology or used a universal print driver that was compatible across the board with various printer models and types.<\/p>\n

What were the requirements you were looking for?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In general, we had quite a few requirements in look for a printing solution.<\/p>\n