Nacro Reduces Printing Wait Time From Mins To Seconds

“With UniPrint Infinity, remote users wait time decreased from minutes to seconds.”

– Ben Bispham, ICT Infrastructure Support & Development Manager, Nacro

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Nacro Gives UniPrint Infinity A Vote Of Confidence To Deliver Efficient Citrix Printing With Security.

The Organization

As an established charity with 50 years of experience, Nacro has been repositioning itself as a champion of social justice which continues to put crime prevention and reduction at its core.

They use their knowledge and experience to help the most vulnerable in the community to change their lives and to reach their full potential and aspirations.

Nacro has services in education, housing, employment, consultancy and training across England and Wales.

Nacro’s data centre is hosted offsite in Birmingham by a specialist provider, running a Citrix environment of 40 XenApp 6.5 servers.

This environment delivers a published desktop to 900 staff and volunteers, from 110 offices located around the UK, with several specialist applications requiring constant printing throughout the organization.

The Challenge

Printing problems within Nacro began to emerge as soon as Citrix was adopted.

With a diverse range of 250 printers across the network, each printer driver had to be installed individually and continuously updated on the Citrix servers, causing incompatibility and reliability issues.

In addition, the Windows-based policy requiring printer mapping at each of the 110 offices further inundated the ICT Service Desk. Printing began to grind to a halt as users floundered over which printer to use.

Even when correctly identified, printing was slow with limited bandwidth when print data was transmitted across asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) connections to and from the data centre.

Mobile staff working across offices became increasingly frustrated trying to select the correct printer. Users wanted to gain the confidence that their print jobs would be printed to the correct location in a secure manner.

Ben Bispham, ICT Infrastructure Support & Development Manager, Nacro reflects, “In the past, we have had to manage printer mapping for 900 different users, which caused significant problems, particularly with the combination of drivers and complexities of Windows printer deployment. This was made more difficult due to the number of users who frequently travel between offices. Users were frequently complaining of slow network performance, which was particularly evident during printing.”

On Demand Webinar: 5 Real Benefits You Can Reap From Adding UniPrint Infinity to Citrix

The Solution

Upon testing the UniPrint Infinity software along with the vPad network print appliance, Nacro experienced immediate benefits.

Now working with just one print driver in the Citrix environment – the UniPrint Universal Printer Driver (UPD) – Nacro were able to replace all manufacturer-specific printer drivers, significantly simplifying printer management, eliminating incompatibilities and ensuring ongoing stability.

Remote printing speed also improved immediately as data stream compression kicked in. UniPrint’s Print Stream Compression feature compresses spooled print jobs by up to 95%, promoting fast data transmission to remote sites. Users’ wait time decreased from minutes to seconds.

Using the UniPrint Infinity vPad secure pull printing feature, Nacro ensured the protection of client data confidentiality. Users simply tapped their RFID-enabled ID badge on the vPad touch screen and then released their document to the closest printer.

Staff were able to print and release multiple documents together, saving time and increasing productivity.

The pilot went so well that Nacro rolled out UniPrint Infinity and vPads across their offices and managed residencies.

Installation was a straightforward plug and play, with no onsite configuration required. 50% of the sites were self-installed and up and running within 10 minutes.

Nacro has also recorded cost and resource savings within the UniPrint installation.

Using UniPrint’s Printer Profiles utility, Nacro has set all printouts to black and white (mono) by default, reducing print costs to 0.75 cents per page from 6 cents in colour per page.

In the back office, managing the virtual printing environment is now far less labour intensive. IT only needs to manage and update a single UPD. With driver incompatibilities removed, Citrix server stability has also improved.

Most recently, Nacro have benefited from the ability to connect vPads and printers at sites which are not on the domain and only have a standard internet connection.

This has enabled secure cloud printing from within Citrix to these smaller remote sites across the internet.

The Benefits

Bispham concludes, “This has been a seamless install that alleviates multiple management headaches when printing across Citrix and critically, has placed the power and confidence of secure enabled print back into the hands of our staff.”