tmcd35

A few small jobs to report on, this time nothing Mutliseat related ( ).

Office XP SP3

I'm not going to detail the process here since only out of date institutions like ours are still using this and if you really need the instructions are all over the net (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832671). But, boy what a palaver! I thought I'd have to attach a update or to to the MSI deployment in GPO. Instead I had to unpack the update and tap in a pretty long command to get the ball rolling. Still job done!

Actually, this Office XP is an upgrade for the school! We are currently on Office 2000. I'm supposed to be pushing OpenOffice (waiting for Go-OO 3.1 to be released).

Deploying Printers
Sometimes Windows goes out of it's way to impress me. And AD/GPO's is one area that never fails. Despite what my Linux loving colleagues may say I think there is a real beauty and elegance in the way AD works.

It used to be to add printers to a suite I'd need a set of printer scripts to run, thus...

Code:

rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /ga /c\\<computername> /n\\<printserver>\<printershare>

Now since Server 2003R2, AD does this for me! And as with most things in AD it's actually quiet simple.

The only 'gotch-ya' is the 'pushprintconnections.exe' which needs to be run via GPO, Computers/Windows/Scripts/Startup. The .exe can be found in the 'C:\WINDOWS\PMCSnap' directory along with the all important 'printmanagement.msc'.

printmanagement.msc makes it a doddle to add a printer deployment to a GPO. I'm setting up new GPO's especially for the various different printer deployments we have around school and then applying them to the relevant Rooms.

So 'Room 1 Printers' GPO contains deployment instructions for the LJ4000 and CLJ4650 in that room. This GPO is then applied to the Room 1 OU and the ICT Teachers Laptops OU.

Great Stuff!

Papercut
On the subject of printers, I've just got my new license for the Papercut Print Management software (http://www.papercut.com/). The Bursar wasn't happy, apparently she has to send the cheque to Australia! Oh-hum

Fires a quick test install. All I can say is, very intuitive. Looks nicely laid out and fairly straight forward to use. Bonus of a nice web interface.

Had to uninstall it almost immediately though. Got the user import wrong and the system wouldn't let me delete the '[All-Users]' group after it had been installed.

Not a problem, I need to get *ALL* the network printers onto the one print server (we only have one print server !?!) and get the new printer deployments sorted through my new AD structure first (see above).

But come the summer and this software can be installed ready to upset the little blighters in September. I'm actually half way through my £6000 consumables budget in just 2 months! Admittedly £400 was for this software