The Pinnacle of Smooth Citrix Printing in Wholesale
Steel and wood are the materials upon which the Austrian company Weyland Group has based both its history and business success. Founded by August Weyland in 1833 as a retail store, today it is a wholesale company that operates in Austria, Croatia and Czech Republic. David Gittler is an IT system administrator at Weyland and is based near Salzburg. This is also where the company’s data center is located, including the central print server on which all Weyland’s printers are installed. “We have been working on Citrix Terminal Server since 2010 and solve the challenge of printing in Citrix environments with ThinPrint,” explains David Gittler.
Another Windows print server with a ThinPrint Engine installed on it is in use at the company headquarters in St. Florian am Inn. Weyland is currently in the process of equipping all its branches with ThinPrint Hubs, replacing existing third-party devices. The ThinPrint Hubs ensure an easy connection of the printers in the various locations with Weyland’s headquarters.
ThinPrint Solves Bandwidth and Driver Problems for Citrix Printing
Before Citrix was introduced, the steel and timber supplier’s IT landscape was distributed and characterized by local installations of PCs and print servers in the individual branches. With Citrix, the infrastructure was then centralized. ThinPrint was added to ensure further bandwidth optimization and above all, to provide a uniform printer driver. “Drivers can cause problems,” David Gittler knows from experience. There are 150 printers in the entire company in twenty locations, there is always a device among them, for which the current driver was not installed, which caused interrupted workflows for users and added to the IT department’s workload.
The system administrator also no longer wanted to set up a Windows print server in every branch. In the past, mostly older Windows XP PCs were used for this purpose, which had to be constantly updated and also posed additional issues with inconvenient stability problems every few weeks.
The new ThinPrint Hubs were therefore an ideal solution for Weyland. They are suitable for any company that has several branches, and which has centralized its IT. David Gittler simply sends a gateway appliance to a branch of the business and a colleague on site connects it to the network, a task that doesn’t even require technical knowledge. On the ThinPrint Hub console, you just need to click on “Search Printer” and the device will immediately find all the print devices which are available in the network.
ThinPrint Hub Manages any Number of Printers
“We used a similar technology to collect print jobs locally, but these devices were always limited to a certain number of printers. There is no such limit with the ThinPrint Hub,” said the IT administrator when speaking of the advantages of the ThinPrint solution. Every time a site is added or something in the IT area is updated at that location, Weyland updates that site with a ThinPrint Hub.
Plug & Play Operation
There are no trained IT personnel in branch locations, but this is not even necessary. If something didn’t work with Citrix printing in the past, David Gittler had to laboriously provide telephone support or even send a colleague to the site if necessary. With the ThinPrint Hubs, this is no longer necessary due to their plug & play operation. They are connected to the network instantly and no PC has to be configured for this. And there is no need to install a ThinPrint Client on notebooks, PCs or thin clients. The employees in the individual branches can print faster and far more reliably than before. While it is mainly Office documents being printed so far, in the future ERP documents will also be printed via the ThinPrint Hubs. The Citrix print jobs are distributed to the printers via the ThinPrint Hub from the control center where the print job was triggered. Only the ThinPrint Hub is needed which rolls out the ThinPrint Client.
In the day-to-day busy atmosphere typical of a wholesaler, ThinPrint technology offers reliable support.
“Printing problems on site no longer exist,” said the IT specialist. “And if they do, then ThinPrint’s centralized management will fix them immediately.”