Managing printers in Windows Server 2008 - Part 3

Network Administration - By the third part of this series, we have introduced the new printer management utilities included in Windows Server 2008, introducing how to consolidate printers in the network. In this section, we'll conclude the series by showing you how to use group policy to deploy printers to network clients.

Some problems with the client

Before I get started, I want to point out that the technique I want to show you here will work only with Windows Vista. Both Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista provide group policy settings that do not exist in previous versions of Windows, so you cannot use this technique to deploy network printers to clients. is using Windows XP operating system. However there is another workaround that you can use if you want to deploy printers to these legacy clients.

There is one more problem that we need to point out to the technique that we will introduce to you that network printers need to be specified to be deployed to all clients with attached group policies. immediately. This is an important issue because group policies often apply to a large number of users or computers.

Deploy network printers through group policy settings

The actual deployment of network printers through group policy settings is quite simple. It should be noted that it is not enough if only the print server on the network running Windows Server 2008 is available. In addition to that condition, your Active Directory must understand the group policy settings that you will change. Therefore, the Active Directory schema version must be based on their Windows Server 2003 R2 or Windows Server 2008.

To configure group policy to deploy network printers, let's start by opening the Management console on the Windows Server 2008 print management server. Then navigate through the console tree to Print Management. | Print Servers | your print server | Printers . Right-click on the network printer you want to deploy, then select the Deploy With Group Policy command from the menu that appears, as shown in Figure A below.

Here, Windows will open the Deploy With Group Policy dialog box. The first thing you must do is decide which group policy you want to add the printer to. To do so, click the Browse button, then select a certain group policy from the list.

Next, use the checkboxes below the GPO Name list to control whether the printer needs to be deployed according to a certain principle (user or computer, or both). Finally, click the Add button , then the printer will be added to the list of GPO settings to be deployed, as shown in Figure B. If you want to group the printer in other group policy objects, you have Click the Browse button again, select another group policy object. When done, click OK.

Some problems with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003

As mentioned above, this technique only works with Windows Vista, but there are a number of ways you can apply to deploy printers to Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP.

If you open the Windows'System32 folder of the Windows 2008 server, you will see a file called PushPrinterConnections.exe . You can use the Group Policy Object Editor to add this script to the login script. For example, if you want to apply the script to a user rule, then you need to open the Group Policy Object Editor and navigate through the Group Policy tree to reach User Configuration | Windows Settings | Scripts (Logon / Logoff) . Next, right-click the login script and select the Properties command. After the Logon properties page appears, click the Show Files button. Now, copy the file PushPrinterConnections.exe to the results window. When you're done, go back to the Logon Properties page, click the Add button. Enter PushPrinterConnections.exe into the Script Name field, then enter into LOG Script Parameters field. Click OK twice to complete the process.

Conclude

In this article, I have shown you how to use group policy settings to make it easier to connect users to network printers than to deploy manual printer connections.