Can I have your opinions on Citrix/TS printing please

steinooo

steinooo

steinooo

Soldato
Joined
31 Dec 2003
Posts
4,750
Location
Stoke on Trent
Hi all,

I am trying to figure out a standard solution for printing via Citrix and Terminal Services in a multi domain windows environment with a mixture of good and poor bandwidth sites

I currently have a mixture of:

- local print servers
- terminal servers with printers installed on the terminal server itsself
- session printers (local printers being passed through to the TS session)
- print servers with universal print drivers on them

I don't know a great deal about printing in a server based computing environment, apart from the fact that print drivers installed on TS causes instability, and that bandwidth can be gobbled by printing (and I don't know why this happens)
I've seen all these 3rd party tools like Screwdrivers and Thinprint but I don't understand what they do and how they would help.

Has anyone any advice for me please? However big or small I'd appreciate it.

2 seperate examples of problems I've seen so far:

- Printers are installed on user's PC, printer appears on TS but causes aggro when logging off, taking ages I think because windows couldn't delete it
- Print job from the datacentre using universal print driver in Citrix takes HUGE amount of bandwidth for PDFs or pictures.
 
OK I would like to change my question: How do you find it best to deal with printing large files from 1) a Citrix site with poor bandwidth (but which has a local domain controller), and 2) a Citrix site with poor bandwidth (which has zero local servers)?

I.e.

- Where do you install the printers? (the on-site printer server, a remote printer server, the local Domain Controller, nowhere and just do IP mapping etc)
- Do you use an extra product (ThinPrint, Citrix Branch Repeater, Ticerat etc)
 
I would try setting the GP that adds the local printers to the terminal services session. Then I would use a print server at each site that uses group policy to send out the printers based on groups or other attribute.

But you may want to try some of the followme printing software. safecom, equitrac etc. They allow for rfid printing and one server will queue all the jobs that people send and then when they want them they just swipe their card and the jobs come out of any printer. You might find something like this will help but it may not as well.
 
If you have support on your XA licenses, Citrix have a print managment addon now which may help you. Install an agent on the print server then another on the Citrix servers and the print jobs are delivered by the universal driver to the print server. In theory this means smaller, quicker jobs, but I have to admit, it's not something we currently use.

All our users have their printers set up on the client hardware, so we just map them with the universal driver. Works well for us :)
 
Can't help you too much but we used to use a piece of software called thinprint to minimise the size of print jobs over poor WAN links. Perhaps worth investigating
 
morfmedia said:
Can't help you too much but we used to use a piece of software called thinprint to minimise the size of print jobs over poor WAN links. Perhaps worth investigating
Click to expand...

glad you mentione this - how does it work? Is it installed on each laptop/desktop/thinclient and then on the Citrix server as well?

In the style of Terry Tibbs: thinprint. talk to me :D
 
Hi guys I'm re-looking at this, does anyone here use any 3rd party CTX printing software like ThinPrint or Tricerat I can ask a few questions of please?
 
We still use UniPrint(.net for the URL) to a small degree but are phasing it out now. We've also started looking at the 6.5 printing stuff too.. What's up?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom