Lamar CISD Eliminates Print Servers Across School District with PrinterLogic
St. George, Utah (PRWEB) March 22, 2017 -- PrinterLogic, the leading server-less Enterprise Print Management solution that enables businesses to eliminate Windows print servers, announced today that Texas' Lamar Consolidated Independent School District (CISD) rapidly deployed PrinterLogic's print management software to eliminate its print servers while introducing centralized management and unparalleled ease of use across its expanding distributed print environment.
Prior to installing PrinterLogic, the public school district had relied on another print management solution. Yet the district's high level of geographical distribution and its incredible rate of growth strained the already limited capabilities of the product.
After fully rolling out PrinterLogic's next-generation print management solution in just two days, the dynamic and ever-increasing pool of 22,000 workstations can now print easily and reliably without the need for print servers, and the 1,100-printer fleet can be managed from a single pane of glass.
Spanning a geographical area of 385 square miles in southeast Texas, Lamar CSID is an award-winning public school district located in the Greater Houston area. The district currently serves more than 31,000 students across 45 locations, but as the second-fastest-growing school district in the state, those numbers are increasing quickly. It has already opened 12 campuses in the past decade, and four more are planned in the current bond with another 12-16 needed in the next 10 years. About 1,200 additional students enter Lamar CISD each year.
Until shortly before discovering PrinterLogic, the district was using a cumbersome combination of products as its default print management solution.
"It simply didn't work," says Director of Technology Integration for Lamar CISD Chris Nilsson. "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."
In 2014, he received an e-mail from PrinterLogic. Nilsson realized it was the print management solution he had been waiting for.
"PrinterLogic literally had everything. We wanted no print servers, a centralized 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.'"
Complete deployment of PrinterLogic took a total of just two business days, with one day of that process devoted to an arcane export process from the old print management product that only ran on Windows XP.
Increasing visibility into a distributed print environment
Given the high costs of print management and the types of support tickets that were flooding the service desk, Nilsson knew that the print environment was suffering under the weight of unidentified and unrealized efficiencies.
"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," he says. "It was like we were stuck in 1996."
PrinterLogic's solution has since given Nilsson and his team the enterprise-wide "visibility and transparency" they need to monitor print activity, view detailed information on deployments and respond to new situations before issues arise.
"I know exactly what is deployed in my infrastructure," he says. "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."
Achieving unparalleled ease of print management
As the growth of Lamar CISD's print environment tried to keep pace with the growth of the district itself, the print management paradigm became untenable.
"With the product we were using before, every object—so every printer—had a unique driver assigned," Nilsson says. "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."
Through features such as self-service installation and dynamic deployments, PrinterLogic's print management software has provided the entire district with an "ease of fleet management" that Nilsson simply describes as "brilliant."
"The idea that we have a lot of different models of printers, but we have only eight or nine drivers that cover everything. The ability to simply and easily update any driver and have that change affect 1,100 printers that are installed on 22,000 of our computers. And to know that it's completely reliable, that it just works. That's just huge."
Reducing total cost of ownership (TCO)
Nilsson's data-driven approach to oversight alerted him to the fact that the former print management product was resulting in an inordinate number of print-related support tickets.
"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."
The sheer volume of support tickets became a problem in and of itself. Protracted resolution times severely limited users' productivity, and the support team was so overwhelmed by basic print management—"requests to have printers installed, removed, drivers changed, print queues cleared"—that it was unable to deal promptly with other issues. This naturally drove up the TCO.
Today, Nilsson and his team are able to resolve most tickets in less than nine hours. Escalated tickets are dealt with in under two hours on average.
"We have almost zero print-related help desk tickets," he says. "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 further projects that Lamar CISD will save $45,000 in server fees alone over the first five years of the PrinterLogic implementation.
"The cost to buy the perpetual license is equal to the maintenance cost we were paying to the former print management company," he says. "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."
About PrinterLogic
Thousands of enterprises use PrinterLogic's patent-pending printer and driver management platform to deliver Mobile, Pull and Virtual printing, while eliminating print servers and providing a self-service portal that empowers end users to install their own printers. PrinterLogic recently won the 2017 Buyers Laboratory prestigious Pick award as Outstanding Enterprise Print Environment Platform. In addition, the company has been recognized twice as one of the fastest growing companies in North America – being ranked number 141 overall (and 8th amongst software vendors) on the Inc. 5000 and number 107 on the Deloitte Fast 500. For more information, or for a free trial, please visit http://www.printerlogic.com. Questions? Watch our video or connect with us on Twitter at @PrinterLogic or follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram and Google+.
PrinterLogic Media Relations, PrinterLogic, http://www.printerlogic.com, +1 435-243-7397, [email protected]
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