[THIN] Re: Thin Print Vs Provision Vs Universal Vs Windows 2008

Hi Jim,

 

My apologies. I got carried away and didn't even answer your questions properly. Got hung up on ThinPrint......

 

Now for your questions:

 

1. If the upgrade is cgoing to cost you a lot of cash I'd think of maybe not doing it.

2. Absolutely :-)

3. XPS isn't too bad but you don't start getting real value out of it as a generic printing solution until you've got XPS compatible network printers etc. It's still only a partial solution and you'll end up with non-XPS and XPS printing in your environment unless you get a real UPD solution.
4. I love Konica MFP devices. Their postscript drivers would have to be the most inefficient drivers on the market and you can be absolutely certain to sell a UPD solution to someone with Konica MFP's on their WAN. A good UPD should allow you to select the advanced printing properties at the client end. Most of them do that.

5. An active/passive cluster aware UPD solution is nice, but once you get way from using non-UPD drivers on Citrix the printing stability just goes through the roof so the only thing you've got to worry about most times is hardware failure on the print server. Making it a multi vCPU virtual machine isn't a bad way to go for that number of users.

 

regards,

 

Rick

 

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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)

1. Do we keep Thin Print and Upgrade to a better version (current 7.0.619.5)
2. Do we look to another product (provision networks or something else)
3. Do we look to upgrade to Windows Server 2008 and use some of the newer printing features with no other 3rd party software? (XPSDrv or whatever it is)
4. We have a number of Konica MFD Devices to be 'migrated' which may or may not support universal printing (due to the extra features, stapling, trays etc) Do we force the rule of "Universal Driver Only"? and what do we do for the printers that don't work? native drivers?
5. What do we do about redundancy for print services for citrix users

We will be using a brand new XenApp 5 Farm

All 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 Wishes

 

James

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