The Mess of Managing Printers through Group Policy

This is a subject I have written about numerous times before. Here are the previous articles:

• http://nzschooltech.blogspot.com/2009/01/mapping-printers-and-drives-through.html
• http://nzschooltech.blogspot.com/2008/08/pushing-printer-settings-to-client-pcs.html
• http://nzschooltech.blogspot.com/2008/02/using-loopback-policy-to-set-per.html

Here is a brief history of managed printer deployment options in Windows:

• Prior to Windows Server 2003 R2, administrators mass deployed printers to workstations using logon scripts (VBScript etc).
• WS2003 R2 introduced Print Management via Group Policy (PMCSnap). Using the Deploy Printers extensions to GP, and a client executable called PushPrinterConnections.exe (PPC), printers can now be specified in Group Policy and pushed out to XP and later Windows clients. This is supposed to work for both per-user and per-computer printers identically. In practice we have only made per-computer work reliably and find that the old printer connections are not always removed when the GPO is removed from the OU.
• WS2008/Vista introduced printer management via Group Policy Preference extensions. This works a little differently from Deploy Printers. Network shared printers can only be specified per-user (rather than per-computer) and on Vista and later clients, printer drivers are not automatically installed as they are on XP. Both XP and Vista require a Client Side Extension to be installed (distributed as a KB update) to process GPP settings. One nice little feature of GPP is to set a default printer. I am somewhat of the opinion that a mixture of PMCSnap and GPP might overcome the various issues, where a default printer absolutely must be settable.

So… we started using PMCSnap when we got our first 2003 R2 server. Then we started using GPP when we got our first Vista workstation. Now we have gone back to PMCSnap for post-XP clients so that their drivers are installed. We were only able to make PMCSnap work for per-computer and GPP is only really practical for per-user in its current form. To add further to this mish-mash, I decided to switch a select group of staff PCs running XP back to PMCSnap. Here I ran into yet another problem, different versions of PPC (PushPrinterConnections.exe). This is a client executable you deploy via startup or login script to process the Deploy Printer GPO settings. It is only required on XP or below. First time I tried it, I was using a Windows Server 2008 box to run GPMC. No problem, I thought, grab PPC from C:WindowsSystem32 just like the documentation says. Version 6.0.something. But it didn’t work. Printers weren’t pushed. Try -the log parameter. GPResult tells me the policy was applied, but no log file so PPC hasn’t been run. Strange. After a lot of testing I decided to grab the WS2003 version of PPC from the R2 server that we still have (C:WindowsPMCSnap). Version 5.2.something. Well to cut a long story short, it works. Just like that.