The Paperless Office dream remains a nightmare, as cheap printers abound and may soon show up as toys in cereal boxes. How can you manage a different printer model for every user? UniPrint offers an interesting solution for those using Citrix and Microsoft Windows Terminal Server.

Here's the nightmare: you move to server-based computing to securely connect branch offices and employees working outside the office, and maybe even some users inside. Your financial person works at home one night, creates a killer budget spreadsheet, but can't print to the cheap ink jet printer connected to the remote PC. There's no driver for that printer on the server, and no easy way to support every odd printer connected to every remote PC. You've traded printing problems for better security, but users care far more about printing than security. They will tell you so in no uncertain terms, at high volume.

Enter UniPrint's Terminal Server Edition 6.0, and the company’s claim of providing enterprise-class printing for small and midsize businesses. UniPrint avoids the normal enterprise "one printer for everyone" model by controlling and changing the print job, not the printer drivers. This twist allows them to give enterprise control yet print out to every small, cheap printer that supports PDF.

Adobe's PDF started in the early 1990s as a proprietary format with added costs for the software to create and read the files. Cleverly, Adobe soon made the reader free, allowed companies to start creating PDF files (like Macintosh computers and the Open Office suite), and worked with the Open Source Software crowd. Adobe has patents etc., but it allows royalty-free use of everything except the higher-end document security controls. PDF is one of those products that's open but controlled by one company.

The value of PDF is that all printers handle PDF files using their installed PDF printer driver. Many applications can create PDF files, including the print server from UniPrint when installed on Citrix and Windows Terminal Server systems.

When a terminal user (the terminals are full PCs running special software, and the actual processing happens on the remote server) creates a print job, UniPrint spits out a PDF file. That file goes in the background to the printer attached to the remote PC and prints using the printer's own PDF driver. Since PDF files include all the content details but none of the operating system and application details where they were created, any printer with a PDF driver (which is darn near all of them) can print the created file.

James Gaskin writes books (16 so far), articles and jokes about technology and real life from his home office in the Dallas area.