For reasons beyond my control, I've been tasked with setting up GPO/GPPs to deploy our 100+ printers to our 1000+ clients.
The good news is that we have over a dozen sites, and for the most part, I'm allowed to push out all printers at site X to all client PCs at site X.
The bad news is that the two ways I know how to do it ("Deploy with Group Policy...", from the print server" and using GPP/Group Policy Preferences) involve vastly more manual work than I'm willing to for this many printers. I can't even seem to select all the printers on a print server and use the Deploy with Group Policy...
option, for example - it expects me to do that one by one, which isn't going to happen. The GPPs are even worse, as it expects me to select a printer's path from the print server and then manually punch in a bunch of information (such as printer IP) that it should be able to get from the printer connection.
My Google-Fu for a script to add all printers on a print server to a GPO/GPP came up empty, and I can't seem to see another way to do this in even a semi-automated fashion, but I'm sticking with the belief that I'm missing something, because there's no way any sane person would chose to manually add hundreds of printers into GPOs.
Ideally, I'd want to find a programmatic way to use the GPPs, but under the circumstances, any solution that doesn't involve dozens of hours manually adding printers would be just great.
Does anyone have a way to do this, or am I going to need to build a PowerShell script and/or trick a subordinate into doing this?
$GPM = New-Object -ComObject GPMgmt.Gpm
. I think that interface, while being an absolute pig to work with, might provide you with a slightly more supportable method than simply hacking some XML that comes out looking and smelling like a real GPO. No one likes COM though. Least of all we Powershellers.