Deploying Printers to Computers vs. Users via GPO
Solution 1:
Here's what you have to do to get Windows 7 to be printer friendly with a Windows 2003 domain/print server.
- Load up Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 on your Windows 7 machine
- Create a
PolicyDefinitionsfolder in%systemroot%\sysvol\domain\policies\on your domain controller. - From the Windows 7 machine, you want to copy everything in
%systemroot%\PolicyDefinitions\into\\\domain\sysvol\domain\Policies\PolicyDefinitions - You'll need to install the Group Policy Management Console from the Add/Remove Programs (
Programs and Features>Turn Windows features on or off) - After that from the Group Policy Management Console on your Windows 7 computer, you'll want to create a new GPO for windows 7 machines and apply the following.
Computer configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Printers
Set the following options:
- Only use package point and print - disabled
- Package point and print - approved servers - disabled
- Point and print restrictions - disabled
EDIT
I would also like to add I've had a lot of trouble with this and want this answer to be complete. I've had issues with users not being able to print randomly. It would remove the printer and when reading it from GPO we would see the following suppressed message:
The user 'printername' preference item in the 'Site-User-Preferences-Policy {Policy-ID}' Group Policy object did not apply because it failed with error code '0x800706ba The RPC server is unavailable.' This error was suppressed.
When I would manually try to add it from the print server I would then have the message:
Connect to Printer
Windows cannot connect to the printer
Operation failed with error 0x0000002
After chasing this around for a few weeks, I found someone else had the problem. The issue is corrected the following Microsoft Hotfix:
A computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 intermittently cannot use a shared network printer to print.
Update for Windows 7 SP1
Windows 7 SP1 includes this hotfix, so if you're having this problem with SP1 you need to keep digging. Took me a while to figure out, so thought I'd save others the trouble. I'll repost here if I figure out why this happens on SP1.