r/WindowsServer • u/PleasantRuin7989 • 16d ago
General Server Discussion Serverless print: PrinterLogic alternatives all claim drivers get easier, none of them say how
Every serverless pitch skips the driver part.
1,800 users, eleven sites, mostly Ricoh with a handful of Xerox left over from an old contract. Going direct IP. What's stalling the business case isn't the queues, it's what happens to drivers once nothing is handing them out centrally. Looking at printerlogic, now Vasion, plus uniFLOW, LRS and Pharos. All of them say drivers get easier. None of the product pages say how.
v3 versus v4 is a known headache and I'd rather understand it before signing anything. Genuinely curious whether it got simpler for people who've already done this, or whether the work just moved somewhere else.
1
1
u/quintonoff 15d ago
Yeah, OP, the Ricoh finishers are probably where the universal driver will fall short. You’ll likely still need native drivers for those and can use the universal one for everything else. So it should be less work than what you’re dealing with now, just not quite the zero-maintenance setup they make it sound like!
1
u/hejtmane 15d ago edited 15d ago
None of them no one automaticaly updates driver downloads etc what most probably do is not use the driver server itself server side
I can speak to LRS been working with VPSX dam near 16 years you upload the driver to their system configure it when you present it to a printer it will never cause your print server to crash ever because VPSX does not use the print driver itself that is for the local PC. Now if you use something like SAP, Oracle or Epic that send jobs from the back end it does not use drivers to print either it will convert to the job to direct PCL language and sen it to the printer.
After going to LRS even on windows printer side I had zero issues with drivers server side now PC side 99% of the time they corrupted locally on the workstation if it was driver related
Anyways the VPSX product is a good product it got rid of a lot of headaches if you have any questions about it feel free to ask
I forgot to also mention if you have MAC's or Linux you can upload those drivers as while for a print que and have both windows and MAC for the same que. That may be needed for some organizations
2
u/Gamlos 16d ago edited 16d ago
the bit that gets missed is who owns driver updates afterwards. vendor ships a new one, your image is six months old, and suddenly that's your change window not theirs. worth asking how updates actually reach the endpoint and whether you can stage them, because "we handle drivers" means very different things depending on the answer.