Hi James,
before I start I'd better warn you that I work for Quest Software. I try to always give an unbiassed opinion but I'd rather tell you up front rather than have you think I'm trying to mislead you.
I have done many large scale Thinprint implementations while I was still wearing a Citrix hat so I believe I know what Im talking about relative to Thinprint. However I haven't touched Thinprint in the last 12 months so some of what I've got to say may no longer be accurate.
Thinprint is actually a pretty good product, but the things that I have trouble with are:
1. The price, particularly when you have to pay extra to print to the Thinprint Gateway from a terminal server
2. The frankly clunky naming conventions that have to be used for remote print queues
3. The impression that embedded Thinprint devices are anywhere near as efficient as win32 devices, because they aren't
4. Their license management sucks
Stuff that's good about Thinprint are things like being able to have a dedicated rendering server (necessary for embedded deives) and obviously the very side support for ThinPrint ranging from ThinOS to just about anything else. Their compression ratios for compressed EMF are very good and they support x64. One thing Thinprint do that no one else does with a UPD solution (I think) is to support PDA printing. That's pretty cool.
Let's talk about the numbered items in turn.
1. In the early days we used ThinPrint with terminal servers and while the Thinprint gateway wasn't cheap, it was pretty good value for money. Then ThinPrint suddenly turned around and said to their customers that if they were using TS they had to buy a TS license as well, even if they weren't using any of the TS functionality like support for client printers. So we had to pay an extra $1000 dollars so so per TS. Ouch. Then they briefly came out with per-user licensing 18 months ago and reneged on it and to be frank I haven't had a lot of time for them since.
I think they've done a brilliant job in partnering with VMware because they get to charge you extra for the ThinPrint Gatewayif you want to print direct to session/network printers.
ThinPrint is the most expensive printing solution around, as long as you don't put a price on the heartache and pain people have had with printing in the Citrix environment as soon as you throw in network/session printers.
2. Anyone who has ever used the Thinprint gateway to print to remote print servers won't have to be told about their naming conventions.
3. ThinPrint support for embedded devices sounds great until you buy something like the SEH ThinPrint gateway and learn a couple of things. ThinPrint embedded devices are often quite unreliable, and they don't handle compressed EMF, just a compressed rendered print job. The compression ratios you can get with compressed EMF printing to a win32 print server are hugely better. It's far better value for money to buy something like a Mac mini, put XP on it and use it as a print server in a comms cabinet than stuff around with the embedded devices.
4. Oh and it might be better now but ThinPrint's license management used to suck big time.
If we forget about ThinPrint for a while and just talk about what a good UPD product needs, we get questions like:
a. how does it handle fonts that aren't on the client
b. is it stable on the server and on the client
c. does it allow print job bandwidth throttling
d. does it support remote print queues
a. As an example of a truly bad UPD, try adding a couple of characters from the SimSun font to a standard word doument and then print it with the Citrix UPD and watch the print job swell by 10-20 MB. If the font isn't at the other end the Citrix UPD sends the whole font set down to the client, not once but several times. Try the same thing with a few of the other UPD product on the market and almost without exception you'll see some interesting print job bloat.
b. This is a good one. People have been bagging Citrix about their print subsystem stability for ages and then we found out all the problems were due to third-party printer drivers breaking the spooler. Then again they could have finished their print gateway but decided to go with XPS printing instead. After all, everyone will be running Server 2008/Vista so soon that the Server 2003 TS printing problems won't matter. Citrix aside, some of the UPD solutions out there aren't all that stable. I won't mention any names but some of my customers were running them and changed to our UPD solution.
c. Most UPD solutions let you do this, but it's handy to have a bit of granularity here but if you can control every single prnt pipe in your UPD solution, then it's better.
d. The answer here is mostly yes as well, but things like print streaming, use of a definable remote listener port, remote print encryption, ease of configuration and high compression ratios do make a difference. The print job transport protocol matters too. Compressed EMF is usually best, but not always. An intelligent PDF engine that can strip duplicate graphics out of pages can be a lot more efficient when it comes to printing large reports. If the print engine allows you to choose between one or the other then that's pretty good.
I would encourage you to look at Quests's Print-IT product on the basis of my comments above, and compare it to the other UPD print solutions around like Tricerat's Simplify Printing, Uniprint etc. You might like what you see.
regards,
Rick
--
Ulrich Mack
Quest Software
Provision Networks Division
Ulrich Mack
Quest Software
Provision Networks Division
On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 3:25 PM, James Scanlon <scanjam@hotmail.com> wrote:
Greetings List Legends!If anyone of you list citrix / thin legends have any suggestions, thoughts, ideas, I need to advise on the next best step forward for "printing" for our thin environment.I have found ThinPrint to be exceptionally inflexible and expensive though I am uncertain of the alternatives. Really this product was purchased to get the drivers off the Citrix servers (but lumping all the drivers onto 1 thinprint server seems just as stupid to me)
We will be using a brand new XenApp 5 FarmAll this has come up because we are looking to migrate 150 Printers and around 5000 users and I want to make sure we have the best solution in place for printing moving forward for the next 2-3 years min...My thanks and regards to anyone who takes the time to reply, and apologies for the long email!Best WishesJames
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