Tip: Use Group Policy Preferences to deploy printers to terminal server clients

[ZeroHour]

We were just implementing some thin clients and were looking at ways to deploy printers using GPP when we discovered item level targeting in GPP which is designed for RDC/RDS sessions so I thought I would pass it on.

If you use loopback policies and then add a printer using the preferences section of group policy in the item level targeting you will have a section called "Terminal Session"

This will allow you to filter using thin client clientname (aka %clientname% in scripts) which allows you to target the printer to a specific terminal.

 

NOTE: this only works in user context not as a computer config in GP.

 

Other things you can filter with are things such as Application, initial program, session name etc which allows a lot of configuration for thin client setups all without touching a script. The filters can be used in other sections of GPP as well so its not just limited to printers.

 

Enjoy

 

UPDATE: There is a known issue with this targeting in 2008 R2 where it basically doesn't work. To fix please install http://support.microsoft.com/kb/981054

Edited November 3, 2010 by ZeroHour