Preparing to Deploy Printers

Deploying printers using Group Policy requires you to perform the following preparatory steps:

• If you are not using Windows Server 2008 domain controllers, your AD DS schema must first be upgraded to Windows Server 2003 R2 or later. This means the schema revision number must be 9 (for Windows Server 2003) and the schema version number must be 31 (for the R2 schema update). You can use ADSI Edit to determine your current schema version number by looking under the Schema node, right-clicking the object named CN=Schema,CN=Configuration,DC=forest_root_domain, selecting Properties, and then examining the value of the objectVersion attribute. The R2 schema update is required so that Print Management can create the following two objects in AD DS:
  • CN=Schema,CN=Policies,CN=GPO_GUID,CN=Machine,CN=PushPrinterConnections
  • CN=Schema,CN=Policies,CN=GPO_GUID,CN=User,CN=PushPrinterConnections
• If your client computers are running an earlier version of Windows, you must deploy the PushPrinterConnections.exe utility to these clients prior to using Group Policy to deploy printer connections to these computers. The PushPrinterConnections.exe utility reads the GPOs that are used to deploy printer connections and adds or removes these connections on the client as needed. The easiest way to deploy PushPrinterConnections.exe is to use a GPO as follows:
  • As a user logon script for deploying per-user printer connections
  • As a computer startup script for deploying per-computer printer connections
  The simplest approach is to use the same GPO to deploy both PushPrinterConnections.exe to targeted users and/or computers using startup/logon scripts and the actual printer connections themselves to those users and/or computers. Beginning with Windows Vista, however, you do not need to first deploy PushPrinterConnections.exe to client computers because Windows Vista and later versions include this capability in the operating system.