Great Plains - Printing

[ITSmith]

Hello,

We have a few users (at this location) that run Great Plains over Citrix, and at least 2 of them generate and need to print sizable (often 300-400 page) reports a few times per week.
Some reports are painfully slow to print, while some jobs fail altogether.

Background:
- Both users are on stand-alone PCs that are 6 months old.
- Both connect to and run Great Plains on the same Citrix
Server (900-1000 miles from this office)
- When the Citrix servers were here, everything ran fast.
- We've been told the lines are fractional T1 - not certain
how fractional.
- Jobs are being sent to a network printer here, that is
installed on the local file server.
- A local (LPT1) printer on the user's station was tried
previously with no improvement.
- Not all reports are slow - ones in "Graphics Mode"
are the worst.
- Testing has revealed that most of the time, it's better
to print the report in batches of pages - not more
than 20 at a time.
- Generally speaking, all other network tasks -
Internet, browsing domain tree, mapping, file transfer,
etc., work at a speed we would expect.

Any thoughts on the topic would be much appreciated !

Thank You -
ITS

 

[jazgeek]

citrix printing isn't exactly the best

you can try products like printrdp or similar, but I would suggest you direct your output to a print device that outputs in pdf such as adobe distiller, email the report to the destination and then print.


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and they wonder why they call it Great Pains!

jaz

 

[ITSmith]

Hello Jaz -

I haven't been back for a while.
Thanks for the reply.

Amen - A pain it can be...

Your suggestion falls into the category of solutions that we have not yet
tried (alternate methods). Sometimes those are the best - or at least the quickest.
I've had other things going on, but need to re-visit the situation.
Drivers came to mind also - a hybrid environment of PCLx/PS/UPDs may not be helping things. Need to check more.

Thank You Again -
ITS