Easy printing solution for IT Staff and Users

Making printer deployment easy:

When I have joined this business printing was not a solution but more of a problem causing a lot of support overheads. Customers were confused of how to find a printer and staff even more confused because of the many various implementations and printing solutions in place. 

In this tutorial I will try and show you how to clean up your environment a little and make users and support staff life easy. 

Part 1. No locally shared printers / How to publish them to a file-print server

There is more trouble than benefit in having printers set up this way.

• New IT staff does not know specifics of these
• Customers most of the time unaware printers are shared of their machine and power them off
• No way of centrally updating or managing the printer
• A lot more headaches which I will not list (including undesired network traffic)

How to publish printers properly: 

Most businesses will have a file print server. The perfect location to put your printers.

0. Go to the manufacturer website and download both x86 and x64 bit drivers for your printer specific model. (Bad idea to use generic drivers)

1. Log onto the server

2. Open Printer Management and select add printer:

3. Select TCP/IP or if the printer is attached locally to the server the port its attached to. 
4. Enter the IP address of the printer (you have to make all printers IP Static) 
5. Untick the option of automatically detect driver (most of the time in experience the driver attached is out of date and will cause issues)
6. Give the printer a meaningful name. Good example for "Finance in Dublin" : DUBFIN01 (Make sure printer name and share name are the same).
7. Finish the install and go back to the printer instance right clicking it and proprieties.
8. Sharing tab: Tick list in directory (this will allow users to add the printer from AD or new OS's will discover it automatically when trying to add a new network printer)
9. Sharing tab -> Additional Drivers: Ensure both x86 and x64 bit drivers are available. This is from where clients will pull drivers to install the printer. 
10. Advanced tab: Set printing default to the way you desire.
11. Device Settings tab: Here you can enforce various settings like "Only B&W printing". Good practice is to have two instances of each printer where one is color and one B&W. Only privileged users should have access to the color instance for cost saving. 

At this stage the printer is availble to share from the file print server. You can add it by Control Panel -> Printers -> Add a network printer -> \\YOUSERVERNAME\PRINTERNAME

However this is sometime difficult to explain to users and we have no record of who has what printer. 

2. Deploy printers using Active Directory Security Groups and Group Policy

1. First create one group for each printer in AD (Domain local or global). Do not create Universal groups as its unnecessary replication traffic.You will use membership of this group to automatically deploy the printer. 
2. Go back to Printer Management -> Right Click Printer -> Deploy with Group Policy ->
Click browse -> Select the root OU of users -> Click create new Group Policy Object and give it the name of your printer -> Highlight it and click ok which will bring you back to the original screen:

 3. Tick the box for "per user" GPO as shown and click Add. 
 4. Click Ok. 
 5. Now browse to your Group Policy Management Console and locate the policy created above and remove "Authenticated Users" from Security Filtering [first screen - easy to find] and add the AD group you have created previous. 

At this stage any user added to the printer group will have the printer mapped at first logon. Beware this is not working for Windows XP users. There is a little client which you need to install to make this work. We will look at XP Clients below. Simple script to map printers for them.

3. Deploying printers to Win XP / Vista / Win7 / Win8 - 8.1 using a VBScript. 

Because the above method only works without any effort with client later than Windows XP. Here is a simple solution for XP users, This also works for all other later Windows OS's.

1. Create a share which users can access also to store your scripts (Ex: \\YOURSERVER\1.InstallPrinters)

2. Using notepad create the following script. I create a script for each printer. 

set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set net = CreateObject("WScript.Network")
net.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\YOURSERVER\BLACKWHITE_INSTANCE"
net.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\YOURSERVER\COLOUR_INSTANCE"

net.SetDefaultPrinter "\\YOURSERVER\BLACKWHITE_INSTANCE"


MsgBox "Printer XXXXXXX Installed Successfully"

You can add multiple printers into the script. 

3. Save As a .VBS extension file. 

To remove a printer instance the command is: 
net.RemovePrinterConnection "\\YOURSERVER\COLOUR_INSTANCE"

The benefits of these scripts are that you can publish them to your logon script to department or location specific users. 

I hope this was helpful for you. 
Please contact me if you find any steps missing in this document.