Terminal Services VS. Citrix (printing)

[johndan]

I know the Citrix product is proven and we have suggested some of our clients use it to deploy our Visual Foxpro app. But, th one thing is that it is so darn expensive.

I have played around with TS just for acessing our app and it was nice performance...My main concern is that I hear that printing is a problem. Our app prints reports, checks and purchase orders. pretty critical stuff......

Any comments from anyone that is happy with TS along with printing...??

 

[Alltimed]

We implement both Citrix and TS to customers. I dont see how it is any harder to print in TS than in Citrix. If the printers are installed correctly on the TS and mapped properly, there will be no problems.

 

[jockojem]

Depends on the scale and the nature of the deployment. Win2003 now has sufficient capability to map all client printers over rdp. However this is only desirable if you have a very tightly run ship client side. The real problems are caused by buggy drivers. Citrix can help a lot by allowing you to simply restrict printer drivers installed and map ropey client drivers to approved server drivers.

Do a search on this forum and citrix for plenty of TS printer related posts. Also check out

http://www.printingsupport.com

which is dedicated to this topic!

Best of luck.

Jem

 

[tracihill]

I've implemented terminal services at my company, also printing checks, POs, reports, the whole enchilada. I haven't experienced any problems with printing in terminal services itself. However, before upgrading bandwidth, a couple of satellite offices did experience extra delay in printing. They happened to be printing to an HP 4200, so I just set the printer to use the HP2200 driver. Worked perfectly.
To make it more fun, our users are using terminal services to connect to an ASP running Citrix for one of our applications. Wheee!
My printing problems really came down to bandwidth, and the "fixes" have always been: dumb down the print driver. Which is- from what I've seen- what Citrix does. Citrix Universal Driver is just PCL4. Usually, these days, you use PCL6 or PCL5e. They just dumb it down.
There are companies that offer universal print drivers as well, so if you go with TS and have crazy printing problems, you could have the option of a universal print driver as well.
Our wan is 200 end users spread across 9 offices in 9 different cities; main office houses all servers-Win2K ; WinXP, Win2k, and Win98 clients, using both terminal services and remote desktop.
Hope this helps.

Traci

 

[johndan]

Thanks for all the input......

Tracihill, are your printers networked or a blend of locals? My other question is ... Do your remote sites access application thru a published app on their native desktop?

thanks....

 

[tracihill]

Networked printers. Win2K and XP users run native. Win98 machines run TS. That way, a little easier on the budget- gain time to phase out the Win98 machines over a longer period of time.