New AD users not picking up Printers GPO

[Sonic007]

I have new printers coming in a few weeks time so may just switch to deploying to computer instead of user. I believe this may solve it.

[Koldov]

How are these printers deployed (in user configuration I presume)?

Yes, they apply to the user via User Configuration > Policies > Windows Settings > Deployed Printers

 

Ah, I thought so given your Event Viewer screenshot. I haven't seen printers deployed that way in a long time, (does this come from the Print Server and right-clicking on a printer > Deploy with GPO?) I think we used to use that after we stopped using start-up scripts.

 

Have you thought about doing it with a more modern method such as GPP (or a least trying it on a test user). I've seen that some people don't find it very reliable, but we've never had any issues with it (until Print Nightmare obviously, but I think that messed nearly everybody up)?

[Katy]

Ah. Yeah I've always (since it appeared in ~2008) used Group Policy Preferences (and when that fails you sometimes get an actual error code. It might not make any sense or have any relation to the problem, but there's a code!), and when I had issues around Win 10 1607 I moved to a PowerShell logon script (if you are feeling brave, https://katystech.blog/on-prem/powershell-printer-script and https://github.com/CoasterKaty/Printers)

 

Things to try:

 

- Point and Print restrictions

- Driver installation - either pre-install the driver or enable the setting that allows standard users to install drivers

(One of the settings around these lets you define a list of servers from which drivers can automatically be pulled from, that'll be the print server)

- Move to Group Policy Preferences for the printer deployment (or my script)

 

Also to note, if you deploy a printer to a computer (rather than a user) you lose the ability to target a shared printer, so it'd install as a local printer on each computer, pointing at the actual physical printer's IP, so this would bypass anything such as PaperCut you might have running on the server.

Edited October 6, 2022 by Katy

[Koldov]

I was going to mention that on the rare occasion GPP has failed there was slightly more to go on in Event Viewer.

 

Even reminding me that one failed due to actual 'Policy Restriction' which led me to remember that although I thought I had redone all the policies after moving DCs and Print Server (including all Point and Print restrictions), I'd forgotten to include the bit about non-packaged Point and Print (yes, we have some old printers with drivers that are probably written in Basic or something)....

[CHiLL]

Microsoft changed how printers were deployed/installed back with Windows 8/8.1 and lots of orgs have had issues with printers since. Our map reliably - unless it's the user's first log on to that machine (or the profile has been wiped). If they log off and on again, it works every time thereafter.

 

I would try deploying a printer via a user GPP (you can also use item-level targetting) and see if that produces the same result. If it still doesn't work, you may have a more meaningful error messing in Event Viewer.