The MPS company’s software has been deployed by a school district in Texas.
Texas’ Lamar Consolidated Independent School District (CISD) installed PrinterLogic’s print management software to “eliminate its print servers” and introduce “centralised management”, with ease of access across its print environment, after using another company’s solution that was limited in its capabilities. After installing PrinterLogic’s next-generation solution within two days, the school district’s 22,000 workstations now print reliably and easily, the company claimed.
In turn, one LED screen can manage the 1,100 printer fleet. CISD is fast expanding and has 45 locations, 12 campuses and four more planned with the need for 12 to 16 over the next 10 years. Students increase by 1,200 each year, and there are more than 31,000 at present. Before using PrinterLogic the district used combinations of products which did not work, said Chris Nilsson, Director of Technology Integration for Lamar CISSD.
He added: “Four years ago, we finally got our Active Directory infrastructure fully up and running. We decided to keep the print management product because at the time we believed our options were [that] or Windows Print Server. Neither one seemed great, but the devil we knew was what we had.”
Nilsson contacted PrinterLogic in 2014, and stated: “PrinterLogic literally had everything. We wanted no print servers, a centralised driver source, profiling, ease of automated deployment, reporting and monitoring, and deployment options with visual maps. It was like I had sat down with PrinterLogic’s engineers and said, ‘This is what we want’. We just reached the point where, when I looked at the data, we were sending people to go out and fix things that never should have been a problem or should have been able to be fixed remotely or automatically. It was like we were stuck in 1996.”
Recently, PrinterLogic’s solution gave Nilsson the “enterprise-wide visibility and transparency” to monitor printing, “detailed information on deployments” and tackle new situations before any issues arise. He commented that “I know exactly what is deployed in my infrastructure. I know exactly which printers are healthy or not healthy. I know what’s happening on those printers. I know exactly what it’s costing me. That visibility is great.
“With the product we were using before, every object—so every printer—had a unique driver assigned. Nothing was shared. So when you wanted to make a change in the fleet, you had to make it individually everywhere. There was no simple automated routine. The concept of profiling a printer driver and scoping that to specific locations just didn’t exist”.
The solution has also reduced the TCO, and most tickets are now resolved in under nine hours, he stated: “We were running extremely high ticket counts, and there were extremely long wait times for users. If they put in a work order, they didn’t know if it was going to be that day or a year and a half. We were averaging about 97 days to solve an issue. It was just horrible.
“We have almost zero print-related help desk tickets. We went from about 2,500 printer-related tickets in a year down to three or four. Soft costs in particular went down massively.” He also added that the CISD will save $45,000 (€41,701) in server fees in the first five years of using PrinterLogic.
Nilsson concluded: “The cost to buy the perpetual license is equal to the maintenance cost we were paying to the former print management company. In the 17 years I’ve been doing this, PrinterLogic is the only product that has done more than what its salespeople promised at exactly the cost that was promised, and it beat the implementation timeframe. Even now, after two-and-a-half years, we’ve continued to have no issues. None.”