Print? Who needs it?

A somewhat rhetorical question with my tongue firmly in my cheek but nonetheless, valid.

It is common in the IT community to shy away from the ‘print’ issue. It’s not shiny and very few components, if any, have flashing lights, apart from ‘toner out’ or paper jam indicators of course. No fun!  Its mention is unlikely to appear in any geeky ‘Tech’ review and if you are responsible for it within an organisation you will probably be getting attention from all areas of the business, most of which you wish you weren’t receiving. So, printing definitely isn’t sexy, we are agreed on that.

IT Infrastructure is designed, implemented and managed mostly by extremely smart people. I take my hat off to them. It’s an extremely complicated, time intensive and expensive exercise. The issue though, as I see it, can be summarised in one question; when you are designing an IT infrastructure what thought or priority do you give to print?

I’ll leave that question with you for a moment.

Most of you (I am hoping) reading this will understand what happens when you select ‘print’ on your pc, thin client or mobile device, but for those of you that don’t, please take a moment to understand this; whatever document you are trying to print will get converted from the language of the application (word, PowerPoint etc.) into Enhanced Metafile (EMF) which is Windows’ own proprietary language. This proprietary language is the print data. However, this print data in its Windows form cannot be understood by any printer on the face of this earth, therefore leading to another change of the print data language using the Printer Driver. As you can imagine the sheer intensity of this translation and task is a massive overhead on the underlying resources of the operating system, physical and virtual. Now, after all this we have the print job, and this is what you are trying to send over your network to get your document(s) out of your printer. The problem with this is that this ‘print job’ as it is now called, will definitely be many times larger than the original file. It’s kind of like the difference between a piece of paper and a relatively conservative telephone directory. Sometimes less, sometimes more, but be assured, that print data file is much, much larger than you think.

So now the print job is trying to get down the WAN to the printer. Print data is a hungry animal and will therefore take whatever bandwidth it needs to get to its output device. That’s a worry, because if you have VOIP, you could suffer call quality and all of a sudden appear to be speaking Klingon to the person on the other end of the call. If you are in session in a virtual desktop or published application environment you could suffer latency or even lose the session connection altogether. Nice! Now imagine your entire operation trying to print, after all everyone needs a printer right?

Question to self; whatever happened to the paperless office? Anyway, moving swiftly on.

Managed Print Services or whatever it is called by whoever is trying to sell it to you nowadays is this decade’s description for selling photocopiers. Just as ‘Cloud’ is the IT equivalent of hosting. The only true differentiator today is the ability of the vendor to actually deliver what they say they will, when they have committed to and at the price they have offered. To clarify on the MPS vendors and without naming, there are some vendors that understand the real print issues, but there are many that do not.

Print drivers are another interesting issue when looking at this subject. Any hardware vendor in the Managed Print Service space will always talk about their ‘Universal Print Driver’, let me burst that little bubble right now. There is no such thing as a Universal Print Driver (UPD). I can feel the challenges to this statement mounting as I type……Universal Print Drivers are designed at a moment in time to support a clearly defined range of products. There is not a UPD on the planet that will support all of the devices out there let alone from the same manufacturer.

So, you have invested a great deal of time, resource and money to identifying your new MPS provider and awarded a 5 year contract. Perfect! Maybe not? Rolling out a new set of Multifunctional Devices (MFD’s) across an enterprise does not happen overnight, it takes months or even years depending on the size of your business of course. So in the meantime you have a whole collection of print devices across your business that you have scheduled for replacement, not forgetting the ones that have been overlooked of course like the desktop device that Betty has in accounts in Glasgow, or the home office printers of unknown origin used by your reps….You know the story, right?

My point on the ‘driver’ matter is that these things breed like rabbits! They contribute greatly to such issues as excessive session log on times for your users and the age old conflicts problem between printer driver types and manufacturers all wanting to control ANY print instance, even when the target printer has nothing to do with them. Oh yeah, spooler issues and crashes as well as printer mapping failures are also common problems. All very bad! Have you seen all those support tickets?

So here’s another question for you; how many print drivers do you think that you have clogging up your environment globally? If you can answer this question accurately then I salute you! Remember just because a print driver isn’t assigned to a physical printer doesn’t mean it’s not doing anything. In fact it’s quite the opposite as for EVERY print job on your system ALL printer drivers are loaded and they don’t just smile at each other, it’s a scrap worthy of WWE Royal Rumble!

Meanwhile, whilst all this is going on, your support desk is inundated with calls and tickets to answer that age old query of ‘why can’t I print’? There is no wonder that no one in the business wants to be responsible for print.

There are two common misconceptions in the market today about how to cure this issue. Firstly, if we can’t print, call the MPS vendor and they’ll sort it out? It will not surprise you that the issue is probably not with the print vendor, unless of course the device has run out of toner or died. The second is that it is an IT issue, maybe with the Citrix or VMware environment perhaps? Again, I will chance my arm and say it probably isn’t their fault either. The main reason print causes so many issues in any environment is the way that Microsoft handles the data, good old Enhanced Metafile.

After many, many years selling photocopiers, MFD’s and print hardware in general for some of the biggest names in the market I found myself in a peculiar position when I took up my new role at the beginning of 2015 with ThinPrint. I was astonished that after all those years how little I knew about the space between my print button and the printer. Sad as I am, printing is now far more interesting to me than it has ever been.

As you will have no doubt observed I am a little more ‘savvy’ of the real issues associated with print nowadays, and yet I am still surprised that as successful as ThinPrint is, and with the global customer base we have with some of the biggest and well known organisations in the world, there are not even more companies at least acknowledging the fact that the ‘print’ issue is real and therefore exploring with us how we can assist in rectifying it with them, because we really can; and, we are nice guys to boot!

If nothing else, I hope that I have at least encouraged some people to think about the question raised at the top of this post about the priority given to print when designing their infrastructure.

Finally, if you can relate to any of the issues above then please feel free to drop me a line to my email below and I will gladly spend some time discussing this subject with you.

[email protected]

www.thinprint.com