"Is this real life?" The City of Nashua Eliminates 50+ Helpdesk Tickets per Month with PrinterLogic
What happens when print servers stop breaking? For the City of Nashua, print-related tickets went from 50-plus a month to nearly none. This customer story shows how the New Hampshire city replaced error-prone print servers with Vasion Print centrally managed direct IP printing, cutting overall helpdesk tickets by 20% and saving more than 100 hours of IT time a year. Read the story to learn from the City of Nashua's experience.
How did Vasion Print impact Nashua’s helpdesk workload?
Before Vasion Print, the City of Nashua’s IT team was overwhelmed by printer issues. Out of roughly 300 IT tickets per month, more than 50 tickets were tied to printing problems caused by glitchy print servers and a previous print management tool.
These issues didn’t just show up as tickets. Staff would often bypass the ticketing system and call IT directly whenever they couldn’t print, creating constant interruptions. Even though most fixes took less than five minutes, the disruption to focused work was significant.
After implementing Vasion Print’s centrally managed direct IP printing, those printer-related tickets essentially disappeared. The city saw a 20% reduction in overall helpdesk tickets and eliminated about 50 printer tickets per month. That translates to more than 100 hours of IT time saved annually, which the team has been able to reinvest in higher-value projects like rolling out new password tools, mobile data management, and a Windows 11 upgrade across 550 PCs.
What challenges did Nashua face with its previous print setup?
Before Vasion Print, Nashua’s IT environment relied on virtual print servers to support printing across local government departments. According to Technical Operations Manager Nate Lloyd, those servers were constantly developing issues:
- Servers would fill up disk space and become unstable.
- Attempts to fix issues by creating new print servers just multiplied the number of problematic servers.
- A competing print management tool introduced glitches that triggered random pop-ups and even crashed users’ PCs.
The impact on IT and staff was noticeable:
- At least 20 helpdesk calls at any given time were tied directly to printer problems.
- Overall, more than 50 of the city’s 300 monthly IT tickets were related to preventable printing issues.
- IT spent about two hours per week dealing with printing problems—over 100 hours per year.
- Frequent interruptions made it hard for IT to stay focused on larger projects, since users would call immediately whenever they couldn’t print.
In short, the legacy print servers and the previous tool created an error-prone environment that drained IT time and frustrated end users.
How did Nashua implement Vasion Print and what changed operationally?
The City of Nashua adopted Vasion Print to reimagine how it managed printing across its government departments. The implementation was straightforward and fast:
- The team imported and converted printer information from existing print servers into the Vasion Print (PrinterLogic) Admin Console.
- The entire city government was set up in less than three weeks.
- End users didn’t experience any disruption—printing simply continued to work, but with fewer issues.
Operationally, several things changed for the better:
- No more print servers: IT was able to retire all legacy print servers and the previous competitor solution.
- Centrally managed direct IP printing: Printing is now managed centrally, but jobs go directly from device to printer, reducing points of failure.
- Automated printer deployment: Using on-premises Active Directory, printers are automatically deployed based on users’ organizational units (OUs). New employees get the right printers without manual setup.
- Centralized driver updates: IT can update printer drivers across all devices at once, cutting down on administration time and avoiding driver-related issues.
For example, when Nashua replaced all printers and PCs in the assessing department, they used OUs to bring every printer online at once. Without Vasion Print, IT would have had to manually add printers to each of the 550 PCs. Today, as Nate Lloyd puts it, printing is largely invisible to users—“nothing breaks anymore”—and IT can focus on strategic initiatives instead of daily printer firefighting.