A new Printer Load Balance video is available from Plus Technologies for its OM Plus suite of print management software products. The video demonstrates how easy it is to set up print load balancing and can be found on our Solution section of our website under Load Balancing.

What is Printer Load Balancing?
Print load balancing or printing across multiple printers can significantly improve overall document output performance and speed. Printer load balancing is also sometimes called printer pooling. In high performing print environments, jobs can quickly become stacked, waiting for their turn to print. With Printer Load Balancing, documents are routed to the next available printer and begin printing right away.

What are the performance benefits of Printer Load Balancing?

  • Increased print throughput – Many organizations experience delays, bottlenecks, or slowdowns in their printing process. Often, large documents or batches of documents can significantly slow the overall printing process, resulting in missed or delayed deadlines. By load balancing document output across multiple printers through OM Plus, organizations can greatly increase the speed of large document runs, increase print volume, increase reliability and efficiency, create order specific packets, enhance label management, avoid long delays or lost shipments and increase printer life through even distribution of documents. Unlike traditional printer pooling, printer load balancing enables true round robin functionality.
  • Lower wait times – In high volume, business critical or time sensitive printing environments, multiple jobs are often sent to a single printer in a short amount of time. When this occurs, it is common for documents to stack up, waiting in line for their turn to print. When a printer fails, documents are trapped waiting for the printer to start printing again. This can have a serious impact on printer utilization and printing times. With printer load balancing from Plus Technologies, multiple print jobs do not get stacked, waiting to be printed and unlike Windows printer pooling, jobs are automatically distributed equally to the next available printer in a true round robin fashion. Jobs can also be intelligently routed and distributed based on the size of job, document priority, and printer throughput.
  • Even Device Distribution – Print load balancing is sometimes called printer pooling. Traditional printer pooling has many limitations. The most common is printer pooling does not evenly distribute documents. For instance, when a user sends a large print job to a pool of printers, the document is immediately sent to the first printer in line. Subsequent documents are then sent to the next available printer and so on. Once the first printer in line finishes printing, all new print jobs are sent to it again. Thus skipping the other unused print devices. OM Plus evenly distributes print jobs. For large print jobs, OM Plus can segment a document for a specific number of pages to be distributed across several printers in a class.
  • Decreased Downtime – As organizations continue to grow, they often experience an increase in the scale or volume of print. This increase in volume can have a huge impact on meeting customer demands and expectations. In production environments, slow downs or stoppages can be catastrophic, resulting in missed shipments, deadlines or SLAs. This costs a company money and can have a negative impact on their reputation. Luckily, OM Plus was designed to address these very issues. OM Plus can be configured to provide true load balancing across multiple print devices. When combined with other solutions such as Printer Failover and Notifications, support staff can react proactively to a printer that goes offline unexpectedly.
  • Overcome limitations of the OS’ print spooling utilities – Operating systems such as Windows, LINUX, or UNIX were never designed to address the many challenges businesses face in their document workflow process. Print utilities have stayed the same or experienced very minor changes over the years. Organizations today require dependable print environments that can provide scalability and efficiency. As time goes by, these challenges continue to grow. Print and Output Management systems like OM Plus are needed to address these challenges and provide a high level of functionality. Printer load balancing is one of these popular and important features that is not offered by the traditional print spooling utilities but comes with OM Plus out of the box.
  • No specific printer make, model, or manufacture required – Some printing apps and utilities come with or require customers to use specific printer makes, models, or manufacturers. But what about environments that have older or mixed fleets of printers? Acquiring newer or specific printer brands can be costly and increases the burden on support staff. OM Plus is a printer agnostic print management software suite. Our features such as printer load balancing work with existing printer fleets regardless of make, model, or manufacturer. Solutions from OM Plus are focused on saving customers time and money, allow ease of use, enable advanced features and functionality, and provide a high level of reliability and dependability.

About Plus Technologies
Located in Dayton Ohio, Plus Technologies has developed enterprise level document and print management software since 1994. Plus Technologies focuses on improving business processes affected by documents. We have thousands of customers, tens of thousands of server software installations, and millions of printers under management in 30 countries.

Plus Technologies serves customers of all sizes as our products, licensing, and pricing is scalable upwards and downwards. We have departmental as well as enterprise-wide output management software implementations and have successfully sold into many Fortune 500 organizations.

One reason for our success is our willingness to respond quickly to our customer’s unique requirements. First, we listen to the customer to understand their environment and their needs. Second, we work with the customer to determine the optimal solution. We can quickly make enhancements to our products to meet specific needs. Third, we offer flexible pricing and licensing to suit our customer’s budget. Lastly, we provide world class support. This recipe has served us well over the years and as a result, we have an extremely loyal customer base.