While I mentioned some management advantages of printer-based devices some weeks ago, I didn’t delve into the area of print drivers. A print driver is essentially software installed on your PC that is used to convert Windows screen images into a language a single function printer or MFP can understand, and subsequently print what you expect in the format you expected. Consider the complexity of having current print drivers for all of the output devices connected within a far-flung, networked enterprise.
In the past, IT departments had to monitor all printing devices on their complicated networks and keep each print driver, unique to each printer, updated and working. This took considerable time to manage and prompted numerous Help Desk calls as people tried to print their documents out (often under time pressure) without the right print driver loaded for the particular device they’d chosen. End-users also had to stay up-to-date on driver installations for any directly-connected printers since each printer driver was unique.
The HP Universal Print Driver for Windows, version 3.0 (UPD) has streamlined this whole scenario. With HP Universal Print Drivers, a simple intelligent driver replaces individual drivers by printer. This virtually eliminates the need for your IT team to test, deploy and support multiple print drivers and it greatly simplifies printing for end users. This then frees up your IT staff to concentrate on more strategic projects, saves calls to the Help Desk, while improving productivity for those who print—which is just about everyone in the enterprise.
To benefit from the HP UPD, HP itself deployed this solution in North America, EMEA and the Asia-Pacific regions. Including maintenance, power, support and other associated costs we figured out that print servers were costing approximately $2,900/month per server. We also estimated that HP had some IT people spending from 35% to 45% of their time installing and maintaining disparate print servers. Realized results from deploying the HP Universal Print Driver include:
- Deployment was over a 2 week period—half the time expected.
- A 20% reduction in Help Desk and printer-related support calls in the first 3 months.
HP was able to “retire” 225 redundant print servers--enabling a savings of $7.8 million/year by deploying the HP UPD.
19 IT people gained back up to 45% of their time.
Our industry doesn't have anything close to the HP Universal Print Driver for Windows, version 3.0. The distant alternative is the generic Postscript driver by Xerox that has limited functionality and is only supported on Postscript devices. Some printer companies say they have a universal print driver, but in reality it is a collection of printer-specific drivers assembled and shipped on one “universal” CD. Whereas, the HP Universal Print Driver Series for Windows, version 3.0 supports HP PCL 6, HP PCL5, as well as HP postscript level 2 and 3 emulation. If you haven’t yet tested and deployed the HP Universal Print Driver, your organization may be wasting time and money.
The concept of the universal print driver is something that the technology guys in HP have been cooking up for years. As the marketing executive responsible for this part of the business, I can happily announce that dinner is now “served.”
The latest version of HP’s Universal Print Driver can be downloaded here, free.
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