First off, our printing is cut and dry/simple…all windows clients are
standard, clean desktops with a completely locked down version of Win XP.
Nothing installed locally. Users come into a published desktop that is
hosted in the datacenter via web interface. Printers are auto-created during
login/based on what you have installed (either locally attached or
networked/shared printers) on the local client. We don't save printers in
the user's profile/published desktop.
Thinprint – cost was substantial. Not a cheap solution. This is a very
flexible product and great if you have some funky clients/difficult printing
requirements. We don't. There are a number of ways you can deploy it for
either clientless setup, having local thinprint server, etc, etc. Like I
said, lots of flexibility but each of the options had downsides and if we're
going to pay the high price we want everything fixed/better – not a mostly
lateral move.
You need to install a client on local clients – there are some configs
where you don't have to do this, but again, tradeoffs. Since we do
auto-creation, users were getting two sets of printers – Citrix and
Thinprint…i.e. confusion for clients. You also had to manipulate the local
client (icon in the system tray) to get it just the way you wanted. Again,
great flexibility but confusing for our users/didn't work all the time. The
fact that it didn't work all the time put us in the same boat as Citrix's
UPD…and we were paying quite a bit more. We also didn't like the way you had
to manage the thinprint ports – we saw a lot of manual work for each one of
our Citrix servers…this product would have essentially caused us to have to
"silo" users to specific servers based on printing needs…this goes against
our core thinking/scalability model of keeping things simple/dynamic.
As for Tricerat – we had some test servers bluescreen as a result of using
their solution. That was a pretty massive flag but we continued testing. In
a nutshell the driverless printing was nice but you also had to install a
client on every local machine and that meant additional support
overhead/complicating the environment. We work in a WAN environment with no
permanent connections to the workstations; we can't use deployment tools so
this is problematic. As compared to the UPD, the UPD works…kinda, but
Tricert was working – kinda, as well so again, we're not making much
progress in moving towards lowering costs/adding functionality/increasing
stability. Oh yes, and there is an extra cost involved...
Believe me – if we could find a product that fixed all of our printing
issues (or at least 90%) of them – we would buy it in a heartbeat as
printing is the #1 headache with our model. I just don't think the product
exists…therefore – we ride the UPD.
If anyone knows better – please enlighten me!
Chris
------------------------------
*From:* thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On
Behalf Of *Landin, Mark
*Sent:* Friday, July 28, 2006 1:01 PM
*To:* thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Subject:* [THIN] Re: Moer and more....logon scripts hanging....
Interesting. What problems did you see yourself introducing with a
ThinPrint or a Simplify? Just curious.
------------------------------
*From:* thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On
Behalf Of *Chris Grecsek
*Sent:* Friday, July 28, 2006 2:46 PM
*To:* thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Subject:* [THIN] Re: Moer and more....logon scripts hanging....
Make sure you have the latest hotfixes…there are a few new ones that are
directly related to the cpsvc.exe service (the one that bonks). The
biggest thing we did to stabilize our environment was to force all printing
to be done via the UPD (talking about 4.0 of course).
We looked at 3rd party printing solutions but when we did the full
assessment we determined that we'd be solving some problems but really
trading those for a new set of problems…and paying more money for those
problems/confusing our clients. At the end of the day we just decided that
the proper course was to ride the 4.0 UPD and hope that Citrix continues
to stabilize/improve it.
------------------------------
*From:* thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On
Behalf Of *Schneider, Chad M
*Sent:* Friday, July 28, 2006 11:39 AM
*To:* 'thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx'
*Subject:* [THIN] Moer and more....logon scripts hanging....
Having to restart the spooler…which does not always work successfully,
which then requires a reboot.
Chad Schneider
Technology Analyst/Citrix Admin.
Bemis Company, Inc.
920-303-7609
