Direct IP Printing or Print Servers?
8 April 2016
Direct IP Printing or Print Servers?
Since version 16, PaperCut introduced the tracking and controlling of Direct Print jobs, there has been some (friendly) debate in the Selectec office about the benefits of print servers and direct printing. Below, we’ll talk about some of the benefits of both setups. When should you use a print server compared to setting up direct IP printing?
Printing without a dedicated print server
- With no central print server, you remove a single point of failure from the network.
- Direct printing saves on network traffic by keeping print jobs on the local machine to spool.
- The network users have complete control over the driver to suit their individual needs.
- As the jobs spool locally, resources on a print server are not used. Anyone printing uses the power of their own machine to render the jobs.
Printing through a print server
- The ability to manage all print devices from a central interface cuts down on administration time.
- Deploying printers via Active Directory or similar makes life easier.
- Automatic driver updates are pushed out en-mass.
- Total control over deployed print drivers ensures features and image quality are exactly how the users and administrators need them.
- Setting defaults for print queues and other printer settings is more easily managed in one central location.
- View and manage all queued print jobs from the server to allow oversight of job names, status, and sizes for all jobs.
- The print server logs will keep track of who is printing, and where, so admins have an audit log.
- Cut down on support issues due to user misconfiguration.
- Printer permissions are a basic security requirement, a print server will give you total control over who can print, and where.
- Clustering and pooling of the printers for high availability.
