* UniPrint reduces printing problems in Citrix and Terminal Server
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.
UniPrint licenses its software by server for $1,500. Since most Citrix and Windows Terminal Server systems support between 25 to 50 users, the price per user ranges from $30 to $60. If you can run 100 users on your system, the effective price drops to $15 per user.
A full production version on the UniPrint site can be downloaded and evaluated. Everything works, except there is a watermark placed across the printed pages. Buy the license, and the watermark goes away on the software you have already installed, so the upgrade process takes little time and effort.
I’m surprised PDF printer output hasn’t caught on for more printing needs. The PDF creation process eliminates the variations between, for instance, a Microsoft Word document created on a Windows XP Pro system with a laser printer attached, and printed on a Windows 2000 PC with an ink jet printer. Send a regular Word document back and forth, and you’ll never get the two printouts to look the same because of the differences between versions of the operating systems, Word applications, and fonts installed on both systems. But a PDF file prints exactly the same, ignoring all those details.
More than that, a PDF “flattens” the print job and compresses the file, speeding file transmission and printing times. One UniPrint customer used to take 10 minutes to print complicated maps because the map application created print jobs with multiple graphic layers, each dependent on the application, as do many graphic programs. Exporting to PDF before printing dropped the print time down to about 40 seconds and used much less bandwidth between the remote terminals and the central server.
If you don’t have a Citrix or Windows Terminal Server system, this may not mean much to you. But you can take heart that some companies are attacking the mess that often complicates easy printing. Maybe soon someone will make a UniPrint type system to handle some of the other printing problems, like driver mismatches and constant updates and high consumable usage. Small wonder the Paperless Office dream remains so inviting.
