Ask any admin who runs published applications what generates the most complaints, and the answer is never speed or logins. It is printing: the invoice that comes out at the wrong branch, the label printer that vanishes, the job that prints yesterday's page today. This page explains why — and the fixes in the order they actually work.
Printing breaks in remote sessions for a structural reason: the application runs on the server, but the printer sits on the user's desk. Something has to carry the print job from the server session to that local printer, reformatting it on the way. Citrix spends heavily on this problem. Lightweight alternatives handle it more simply — well enough for most offices, with rough edges this page will not hide.
Tools in this class — and Citrix itself — offer a universal or virtual printer: the application prints to a generic printer on the server, the job travels as a document (often PDF-like), and the user's own device renders it with its correct local driver. This removes the oldest failure in remote printing, the server needing a driver for every printer model in every branch. If your setup offers a universal printer option, it should be the default for ordinary documents.
Label printers, barcode printers, cheque printers and dot-matrix bill printers are not ordinary documents — they need exact sizes, exact trays and sometimes raw commands. These are the cases where a universal printer produces almost-right output, which is worse than none. For these devices, install the printer's real driver and test that one printer, with that one application, from that one branch, until the output is exact. Keep a note of what worked; the next admin will thank you.
An entire product category exists because this problem is real: dedicated remote-printing tools (TSPrint is the best-known name in this space) install a small client where the printers are and a component on the server, and make local printers appear in sessions reliably, without driver battles. If your office prints all day from several branches and the built-in options keep failing, a tool like this is not an extravagance — it is the difference between a system staff trust and one they route around.
Before blaming the platform: is the local printer actually the user's default printer? Does printing work locally, outside the remote session? Is the job enormous — a scanned-image PDF that takes minutes on a slow home connection no matter what you do? Does it fail for everyone, or only from one location? Half of 'the server cannot print' tickets end at the user's own printer, cable or default-printer setting.
Sometimes the cleanest answer is to change the shape: put a proper network printer where the work is and print to it directly from the server, so no redirection is involved at all; or let branch staff print to PDF and print the file locally. Neither is defeat — offices mix these routes for years. What does not work is pretending the difficult printer does not matter while staff quietly keep a separate PC just to print from.
The full on-screen walkthrough — server setup, app publishing and access from anywhere — is in the video above.
▶️ Watch Full VideoBecause the session runs on the server at head office, and the application printed to the printer the server knows — its own local default. The fix is printer redirection or a universal printer, so the job follows the user's session back to the branch printer, or giving the branch a network printer the server prints to directly.
If built-in redirection works for your printers, no. If your office prints constantly from several locations and keeps hitting driver and formatting failures, usually yes — these tools exist specifically to make local printers appear reliably in remote sessions. Judge it on a trial with your worst printer and your busiest branch, not on the demo.
Treat that printer as a special device: install its real driver, set the exact label size in both the application and the driver, and test from the actual branch. Universal printers are designed for office documents and often approximate sizes — for labels, barcodes and pre-printed forms, approximate is the same as wrong.