Can I set up closest printer via Group Policies?

[Guest]

Hi,

Is it possible for me to assign printers to OUs and set those printers as
default printers for users in that OU using group policies?

 

[Dave Britt]

Sam,



The most common way to approach this problem is to use the built in Printer
Locations technology in Active Directory. This policy populates the search
box for users when they are connecting to a printer to show the closest
ones.



http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pr...nologies/activedirectory/deploy/addeploy.mspx



I would recommend that you consider this approach, however to do exactly
what you have asked you can consider using the con2prt.exe utility which
allows you through a logon script to connect a default printer. There is a
great example of this utility on this page



http://www.ss64.com/nt/con2prt.html



But your login script would need to contain the following



CON2PRT /f - Remove existing printer Shares
CON2PRT /c \\PrintServer\PrintShare -Connect to the designated printer
CON2PRT /cd \\PrintServer\PrintShare - Set the new printer as default



This would require a significant amount of management maintenance should
printers change and is impractical in a larger more volatile infrastructure.



Dave Britt