Its assumed that you have already followed Part One and have one or more printers shared on your server with the necessary drivers, ready to deploy to your client computers. You will also need the Print Services role installed on a server (can be on your DC), and you will be using the Print Management and Group Policy Management consoles to configure the various settings. To use Group Policy for printer deployment you will need to have a Windows Active Directory domain, and this article assumes that your Domain Controller is a Windows 2008 R2 Server. This particular printer challenge is a good example of how apparently complicated solutions can be achieved with a few simple GPO settings and some planning: Although quite impressive results can be achieved with old style login scripts (especially if you know vbscript), Group Policy Objects can do much more without requiring you to become a scripting expert. In this article we will look at automating printer deployment with Group Policy and how to use GPOs to assign access to printers.Īnyone responsible for managing a Windows domain based network should be familiar with the basics of Group Policy Management, and the granular control it allows over virtually every setting available within the Windows client systems. For a small network this may well be all you need to know, but with more users and printers there are more tools available to simplify management.

In the first part of this article series covered adding the Print Services role to a Windows 2008 Server, and then how to use the Print Management console to add shared printers with the correct drivers for your network clients.

Windows terminal server printers