The Top 10 Printing Challenges Service Providers Face

More and more companies are outsourcing their infrastructure to the cloud via a service provider. Sometimes it is the entire desktop, delivered by a DaaS provider, others an industry-specific application, provided by a SaaS provider.
And all these users want to print. Service providers face the challenge that if they want satisfied customers, they have to make sure that their customers are also happy when they print. And this is only possible if printouts start when they hit print. Right away, and to the required printer, that which is usually closest to the user.

The hurdles involved are not insignificant: With service providing, print jobs are initiated in the cloud where applications and desktops run. However, the printers are usually located on site with the users. This is just one of many causes that lead to the following 10 most common challenges (yes, unfortunately there are even more) when printing for service providers

The Top 10 Printing Challenges Service Providers Face

1. Print jobs become huge. A 2 MB PPT or PDF can already become a 200 MB print job. This data volume has to travel down lines and harms application and video performance.
2. Size of print jobs is one side of this challenge, the other one is print speed. If the user waits too long for a print job to start, he gets frustrated and hits the print button again and again, creating cost and waste.
3. Correct printouts need the correct printer driver. There are thousands of models of printers, plotters and label printers out there. For each model, there are several different printer drivers for different operating systems. Providing the right driver for each situation becomes a nightmare and causes print errors. Universal printer drivers provided by the printer manufacturers only do the trick for their models and not even all of those.
4. Not all printer drivers are compatible with Terminal Servers or other virtualization platforms and can cause printing coming to a grinding halt and even be a threat for overall performance.
5. Customers’ employees use different devices such as Windows PCs/Laptops, Macs/MacBooks, Chromebooks and thin clients as endpoints and roam from device to device and location to location. You need to make sure that users always get the right printers wherever they are.
6. You need to find a way to reach network printers in masked networks, for example if secure gateways are being used instead of VPN.
7. Print data contains sensitive information. So, you need to make sure that this data is encrypted when in transit. Think of GDPR too. Additionally, printouts sit in the paper tray until the users pick them up. This is another security threat. Many users require confidentiality and don’t want to have to sprint to the printer once they hit print.
8. Printing eats resources on your virtual desktops or terminal servers. If you can get rid of most of this printing workload, you can cram up to 20% more users on your machines.
9. Some users have specific print needs, like paper trays, stapling, N-up, you name it. You need to make sure this functionality always works.
10. Do you promote the use of applications and desktops on mobile devices such as iPads and Android tablets and even iPhones and other smartphones? Then you also need to make sure that printing works seamlessly with these devices too. And be careful – AirPrint doesn’t work from inside a Windows-based session.

Do you want to spend as little time as possible with administration and help desk for printing? ThinPrint offers solutions specifically developed for the needs of service providers, overcoming all these, and many more challenges. Further information on our solutions, as well as our service provider program is available on our website.