Y Soft Australia has stated that “server-less printers [are] the answer to cutting business costs”.
IT Brief reported on the views of Adam O’Neill, Y Soft Australia’s Managing Director, who stated that “one way businesses can reduce costly hardware in their IT print infrastructure is by using ‘server-less’ print management solutions”. His view is that the solutions can “be attractive for organisations looking to reduce costs but it’s also important to understand how they work in order to choose the right solution”.
He added that “by eliminating servers, businesses can bring down the total cost of ownership compared with solutions that require a print server. But not all ‘server-less’ pull-printing options are the same. It’s important for businesses to choose one that suits their specific needs”. He identified eight areas where businesses should look at for co-opting such a system, beginning with “simple failover and print job backup, as well as strong security”.
Second was the “ability to encrypt all locally-stored print jobs, preventing even the user of that particular workstation from accessing them if necessary to maintain strong document and information security”, and third was “automatically optimised compression, rather than requiring compression to be set on the file system level”.
Fourth was “easy backups using standard file system backup agents”, as “some solutions hold print jobs in Windows Spooler, which can be difficult to back up without specialised agents”, while fifth was the “ability to set and modify print job parameters like grayscale versus colour, the number of copies, the print job billing code etcetera using built-in tools”, which “isn’t available in some solutions”.
Sixth was the “isolation of print jobs so users can only see their own print jobs or print jobs shared with them”, while seventh was “the ability to apply print rules common in print management systems such as forced duplex or printing in [monochrome], to locally-spooled print jobs so that all print rules are adhered to throughout the organisation and costs are kept low while efficiency remains high”.
Finally, O’Neill recommended the “ability to optimise WAN traffic and latency as well as resiliency to different kinds of failures or infrastructure outages”. His view was that “while true ‘server-less’ pull-print solutions are actually somewhat of a myth, there are ways to significantly reduce and eliminate many servers. A client-based pull-printing approach lets spooled print jobs be stored in different locations such as on end-user workstations, file servers or cloud storage.
“This lets businesses reduce the number of dedicated servers for printing while maintaining convenient user access to printing from any printer in the network. All while meeting the eight requirements listed above”.