Printer Deployment- whats the best practice?

[marsdenprimary]

Hello,

We've had endless problems here with printing due to having a mix of XP and Windows 7 machines, plus a curriculum network and an admin network. We have a RISOgraph and the IP is on the admin range, gateway is on the curriculum range. This is so all computers can print to it.

My question is this:

What's the best practice for deploying printers? Is it per user or per machine?

We have server 2003 so i'm running RSAT on my admin Windows 7 machine and i've been trying to deploy the printers via this. It's working a little but i'm struggling to work out whether to use printer PREFERENCES or printer DEPLOYMENT... and also- whether to make it per machine or per user.

Hope you can help!

[digitaldomain12]

We use group policy and place Machines in OU's and use the VBS mapping scripts listed here.

Hello,

We've had endless problems here with printing due to having a mix of XP and Windows 7 machines, plus a curriculum network and an admin network. We have a RISOgraph and the IP is on the admin range, gateway is on the curriculum range. This is so all computers can print to it.

My question is this:

What's the best practice for deploying printers? Is it per user or per machine?

We have server 2003 so i'm running RSAT on my admin Windows 7 machine and i've been trying to deploy the printers via this. It's working a little but i'm struggling to work out whether to use printer PREFERENCES or printer DEPLOYMENT... and also- whether to make it per machine or per user.

Hope you can help!

[reggiep]

We use a kixtart script to allocate on a room by room basis, with occasional one off computers.

Dead simple to set up and loads of examples on the kixtart forums.

[marsdenprimary]

We use a kixtart script to allocate on a room by room basis, with occasional one off computers.

Dead simple to set up and loads of examples on the kixtart forums.

Ok thanks I'll have a look. I've managed to get the printers working again just using the printer deployment using RSAT- the preferences were making printers appear twice in the printers and devices...which was confusing...

[Michael]

The best way is either 2003 R2 Print Management, or even better 2008/2008 R2 Print Management.

You can easily deploy per user, per computer or a combination. It's also just as easy to remove the printer as it is to deploy it and to update drivers accordingly.

In the past with scripts I've found updating drivers, removing printers (if it gets replaced for example) or renaming printers to be far more problematic.

Personally I use 2008 R2's Print Management via GPO, although some people here do use GPP as an alternative. A Group Policy deployment method is recommended these days.

[Duke5A]

I still prefer to use scripts myself. I've got a sub rolled into our VB logon script that deals with printers. Thus far it handles W2k/XP/7 without issues using a 2k8 32bit print server that has both x32 and x64 drivers loaded for every printer it hands out.

Anything you can query through a VB script like computer/user LDAP path, group membership, machine name, AD site, everything in WMI, etc, can be used to set conditions for who gets what printer, and which is eventually set as default. For instance, we have our machine names and printer names done by building and room. So a printer in Neverland Elementary room 5 would be named NLE-RM05, while the machines would get named NLE-RM05-TW01/NLE-RM05-SW01. A couple lines of code in the script will hand out classroom printers for every building in the district to where they need to go by parsing the machine name and lining it up against the expected printer name. An added bonus is it'll even set the default printer.

There are multiple ways to go about printer deployment. If all you're doing is pushing out a couple of copiers to every machine in a building, the Print Management would be the way to go, but if you get to the point where printer deployment starts to dictate how you setup your AD structure you might want to give scripting a look at.

[localzuk]

We use this script I wrote - Simple drive mapping and printer deployment - Script Center - Spiceworks

It basically assigns drives and printers according to group membership. So, if someone needs access to a printer or drive, just add them to the group and you're done.

[gshaw]

We use Group Policy Preferences, which replaced our previous VBScript mapping method.

Apply the GPP as a User Logon Script but use the targeting options to map printers by the Computer's OU so users get the correct printer as they roam around the building

[browolf]

Even though we have 2008 servers we're sticking to our trusty login script batch file.

if %computername:~0,3% == B1- (
rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /in /n \\server\B1Mono
rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /in /n \\server\B1colour
rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /y /n \\server\B1Mono /q
echo B1 Printers connected, Default set to Mono.
goto END
)

If it's not broken it don't need 'fixing'

[brownbread]

Group policys or some management software.