Lamar CISD Customer Story
What does it take to cut print-related helpdesk tickets from about 2,500 a year to just three or four? This customer story follows Lamar CISD, a fast-growing Texas school district, as it replaces legacy print infrastructure with Vasion Print (formerly PrinterLogic®). See how a centralized, serverless approach delivered full deployment in two days and eliminated five print servers.
How quickly can PrinterLogic be deployed in a large, distributed school district?
Lamar CISD, a fast-growing public school district in the Greater Houston area, implemented PrinterLogic across the entire district in just two business days.
Here’s what their rollout looked like:
- Scope: 48 locations across 385 square miles, serving more than 37,000 staff and students.
- Environment: About 22,000 workstations, 14,000 iPads, and a mixed fleet of 1,100 printers (Ricoh, HP, Dell, and Canon copiers).
- Servers removed: PrinterLogic replaced one redundant and four primary print servers immediately after purchase.
According to Chris Nilsson, Director of Technology Integration at Lamar CISD, the full deployment took two days, and one of those days was spent on an older iPrint export process that only ran on Windows XP. Once PrinterLogic was in place, the district could:
- Administer the entire print environment from a single pane of glass.
- Automatically deploy printers as soon as a new building came online (for example, when fiber was connected just before students arrived).
For districts with similar size and complexity, this shows that deployment can be measured in days, not months, even in highly distributed environments.
What impact did PrinterLogic have on print-related support tickets and IT workload?
Before PrinterLogic, Lamar CISD’s print environment generated a heavy support burden:
- About 2,500 printer-related helpdesk tickets per year.
- Average resolution time of roughly 97 days for an issue.
- IT staff frequently dispatched on-site to fix problems that could not be handled centrally.
After implementing PrinterLogic, the district was able to reimagine how print support worked:
- Printer-related tickets dropped from 2,500 per year to just 3–4 per year.
- Average ticket turnaround improved to just over one day.
- Most tickets are now resolved in about 8.7 hours, and escalated tickets average under two hours.
This change was driven by:
- Centralized visibility into printer health, usage, and deployments.
- Automated printer deployments without GPOs or scripts.
- Self-service installation and elimination of single points of failure.
For Lamar CISD, this shift freed the IT team from routine print issues so they could focus on higher-value work, while staff experienced more predictable and responsive support.
How does PrinterLogic help manage a large, mixed printer fleet and reduce costs?
Lamar CISD was operating a complex print environment:
- 1,100 printers across 48 locations.
- Predominantly Ricoh devices, with additional HP and Dell printers and a full Canon copier fleet.
- Previously managed as individual devices with unique drivers in Novell iPrint.
With PrinterLogic, they were able to reshape how they managed this fleet:
- Moved to a centralized driver repository and printer profiling.
- Standardized on 8–9 drivers to cover the entire fleet of 1,100 printers.
- Could update a single driver and have that change reliably apply across 22,000 computers.
- Gained detailed insight into which printers were healthy, how they were used, and what they cost.
On the cost side, Lamar CISD saw meaningful savings:
- Eliminated five print servers and their associated upgrade, maintenance, and operating costs.
- Rolled existing iPrint maintenance fees into a three-year purchase plan for PrinterLogic.
- After year three, projected savings of about $20,000 per year in print server system costs.
- “Soft costs” dropped significantly as print-related tickets fell to single digits and on-site visits were minimized.
For districts or organizations with a large, heterogeneous print environment, this approach shows how centralizing drivers, automating deployments, and removing print servers can simplify operations and reduce total cost of ownership.
Lamar CISD Customer Story
published by UPCONNECT LABS LLP
Upconnect Labs is a leading IT Managed Service Providers & IT hardware system integrator dedicated to providing comprehensive technology solutions to businesses of all sizes. With a focus on innovation, reliability, and customer satisfaction, we specialise in designing, implementing, and supporting customised IT infrastructure tailored to meet the unique needs of our clients.
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