[THIN] Re: Thin Print Vs Provision Vs Universal Vs Windows 2008
- From: Rick Mack <ulrich.mack@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:09:33 +1000
Hi James,
before I start I'd better warn you that I work for Quest Software. I try to
always give an unbiassed opinion but I'd rather tell you up front rather
than have you think I'm trying to mislead you.
I have done many large scale Thinprint implementations while I was still
wearing a Citrix hat so I believe I know what Im talking about relative to
Thinprint. However I haven't touched Thinprint in the last 12 months so some
of what I've got to say may no longer be accurate.
Thinprint is actually a pretty good product, but the things that I have
trouble with are:
1. The price, particularly when you have to pay extra to print to the
Thinprint Gateway from a terminal server
2. The frankly clunky naming conventions that have to be used for remote
print queues
3. The impression that embedded Thinprint devices are anywhere near as
efficient as win32 devices, because they aren't
4. Their license management sucks
Stuff that's good about Thinprint are things like being able to have a
dedicated rendering server (necessary for embedded deives) and obviously the
very side support for ThinPrint ranging from ThinOS to just about anything
else. Their compression ratios for compressed EMF are very good and they
support x64. One thing Thinprint do that no one else does with a UPD
solution (I think) is to support PDA printing. That's pretty cool.
Let's talk about the numbered items in turn.
1. In the early days we used ThinPrint with terminal servers and while the
Thinprint gateway wasn't cheap, it was pretty good value for money. Then
ThinPrint suddenly turned around and said to their customers that if they
were using TS they had to buy a TS license as well, even if they weren't
using any of the TS functionality like support for client printers. So we
had to pay an extra $1000 dollars so so per TS. Ouch. Then they briefly came
out with per-user licensing 18 months ago and reneged on it and to be frank
I haven't had a lot of time for them since.
I think they've done a brilliant job in partnering with VMware because they
get to charge you extra for the ThinPrint Gatewayif you want to print direct
to session/network printers.
ThinPrint is the most expensive printing solution around, as long as you
don't put a price on the heartache and pain people have had with printing in
the Citrix environment as soon as you throw in network/session printers.
2. Anyone who has ever used the Thinprint gateway to print to remote print
servers won't have to be told about their naming conventions.
3. ThinPrint support for embedded devices sounds great until you buy
something like the SEH ThinPrint gateway and learn a couple of things.
ThinPrint embedded devices are often quite unreliable, and they don't handle
compressed EMF, just a compressed rendered print job. The compression ratios
you can get with compressed EMF printing to a win32 print server are hugely
better. It's far better value for money to buy something like a Mac mini,
put XP on it and use it as a print server in a comms cabinet than stuff
around with the embedded devices.
4. Oh and it might be better now but ThinPrint's license management used to
suck big time.
If we forget about ThinPrint for a while and just talk about what a good
UPD product needs, we get questions like:
a. how does it handle fonts that aren't on the client
b. is it stable on the server and on the client
c. does it allow print job bandwidth throttling
d. does it support remote print queues
a. As an example of a truly bad UPD, try adding a couple of characters from
the SimSun font to a standard word doument and then print it with the Citrix
UPD and watch the print job swell by 10-20 MB. If the font isn't at the
other end the Citrix UPD sends the whole font set down to the client, not
once but several times. Try the same thing with a few of the other UPD
product on the market and almost without exception you'll see some
interesting print job bloat.
b. This is a good one. People have been bagging Citrix about their print
subsystem stability for ages and then we found out all the problems were due
to third-party printer drivers breaking the spooler. Then again they could
have finished their print gateway but decided to go with XPS printing
instead. After all, everyone will be running Server 2008/Vista so soon that
the Server 2003 TS printing problems won't matter. Citrix aside, some of the
UPD solutions out there aren't all that stable. I won't mention any names
but some of my customers were running them and changed to our UPD solution.
c. Most UPD solutions let you do this, but it's handy to have a bit of
granularity here but if you can control every single prnt pipe in your UPD
solution, then it's better.
d. The answer here is mostly yes as well, but things like print streaming,
use of a definable remote listener port, remote print encryption, ease of
configuration and high compression ratios do make a difference. The print
job transport protocol matters too. Compressed EMF is usually best, but not
always. An intelligent PDF engine that can strip duplicate graphics out of
pages can be a lot more efficient when it comes to printing large reports.
If the print engine allows you to choose between one or the other then
that's pretty good.
I would encourage you to look at Quests's Print-IT product on the basis of
my comments above, and compare it to the other UPD print solutions around
like Tricerat's Simplify Printing, Uniprint etc. You might like what you
see.
regards,
Rick
--
Ulrich Mack
Quest Software
Provision Networks Division
On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 3:25 PM, James Scanlon <scanjam@xxxxxxxxxxx> 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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