ThinPrint and Printing from Windows Terminal Services/Citrix

Getting to grips with ThinPrint (Part I) - Angus' Tech Blog

"Many IT infrastructure architects and system administrators have battled with the problem of printing from applications deployed through Windows Terminal Services or Citrix in heterogeneous networks.  ThinPrint .print is a product suite that can help you out with most scenarios, albeit with a few limitations.

One of the main drawbacks to .print is that it's difficult to understand at first, because there are so many different product options and ways of configuring it. Also, the documentation provided is not that good.  I've spoken to many people and done a lot of research, but no-one's been able to explain to me satisfactorily how the product works.  So I decided to get to grips with it myself and share the benefit of this effort by posting a series of articles on the subject.

To begin with, it's worth highlighting the main benefits it brings:

• Print job compression - extremely useful for low-bandwidth and/or high-latency network connections
• Driverless printing - good for reducing the number of print drivers on a Citrix farm or Terminal Services server.

The best way to explain how it operates is to work through a series of example deployments and detail the processes that take place.  In this, the first of a number of posts on the subject, we'll be looking at the most basic printing scenario: printing in a Windows Terminal Services environment.

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Sounds kind of interesting.

If you’ve ever been in or supported a WTS/Citrix environment you’ll know the problem ThinPrint solves. Printing and printer drivers can be a major pain with WTS/Citrix. And if you have people connecting who are outside your control, clients, business partners, etc, it gets much worse.

Think about how many printer drivers there are. Then think about how different printer brands/models your clients/customers/partners/WTS users have. Think about how often these connecting users add/remove/buy printers. And then think about getting all these drivers onto your WTS in a time-frame acceptable to your users (i.e. “But I need to print NOW… I don’t care if it’s 11pm on Friday…”).

The one downside for this solution is that a client side component is needed. It’s understandable that one is needed, but trying to get that component, even though it’s free, on client/business partner machines might (cough… cough… will) be a hassle. But it’s a one time hassle as opposed to the constant Printer Driver Shuffle game…