Automate the addition of printers to Group Policy

Question

Hi!

I posted a couple of questions in another forum, and got these answers:


1) As far as I know, the printer connections added to a Group Policy using the Windows Server 2003 R2 feature, are stored in the domain partition in Active Directory as objects in objectCategory=msPrint-ConnectionPolicy. Are this the same for Group Policy Preferences in Windows Server 2008/2008 R2? In other words: Can we reuse the printer deployment GPO`s we create now for GP Preferences printer deployment when we some time in the future buy Windows Server 2008 CALs?

You are correct. Using Print Management the GPO is stored in objectCategory=msPrint-ConnectionPolicy. However this is not the same as Group Policy preference. This means we are not able to reuse the GPOs when we use Group Policy Preference in the further.

Print Management is actually more powerful than group policy preference. It is used via group policy as well. We do not need to create a separate group policy for it to use. Instead, we can use any existing group policy such as Default Domain Policy, or the group policy that you have used to deploy printers via group policy preference.
 
With Print Management, we can manage printers more easily. Click Administrative Tool->Print Management and we can manage printers through a central manner, which is more easy and efficient.
 
We can also manage printers in GPO more easily with Print Management installed. To do so, open group policy editor, expand Computer Configuration(User Configuration)->Policies->Windows Settings->Deployed Printers.

2) Are there any automated way to publish the printer connections to a GPO with scripting? To avoid manually adding several hundreds of printer objects to a GPO. We have a csv-file containing all the printer connections.

I tried to find if there is any internal tool for you to do this but it seems very hard to find such one. I suggest we post this question to the MSDN forum because for coding and script questions MSDN is more appreciate:

MSDN Forum can be found here:
http://forums.microsoft.com/





My question are related to how to automate the process of adding printers (\\printserver\printer) to Group Policies in the objectCategory msPrint-ConnectionPolicy in Active Directory.
Preferably I would like to create a PowerShell script to accomplish this.

What forum might be the most appropriate for this question?

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Jan Egil Ring

Blog: http://blog.powershell.no
Twitter: http://twitter.com/janegilring

Answer 1

Hello Jan,

Thank you for your post!  I would suggest creating a new thread for your question in the (Windows Server TechCenter > Windows Server Forums > Group Policy ) forum located here:  (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverGP/threads).

Hope that would be helpful.

Have a great day!

Thanks & regards,

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Ashawani Tier 2 Application Support Server and Tools Online Engineering Live Services Team