"A Week Off?" OR "Deploying Printers!"

"A Week Off?" OR "Deploying Printers!"

Well, it's been a week since I posted last. I had five days off, and so today I'm just going to say that taking breaks is important. I came back refreshed and ready to go. Sadly, the only thing I've been working on is deploying new printers.

The scenario is that we want to keep the names of the printer share, but the model will be different. We're moving to Xerox printers as our standard, with some Ricoh's on the low end. We've had good experiences with their drivers and reliability. We've finally beat it into purchasing that HP's are junk. Well, the drivers are, anyway, but that's what's most important amiright?

So what we do here is set Scriptlogic's Desktop Authority product to remove Printer X from everyone's computer. This takes 5 minutes to propagate, and then we delete the old share from the print server, install the new printer, create the new share, and reverse the Desktop Authority setting to add the printer back (which takes another 5 minutes). We tried just changing the driver and TCP/IP port on the current share to match the new printer, but Windows must store some values elsewhere because we had all kinds of confused client computers after trying this route. Deleting the share altogether and recreating proved to be the best way forward.