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We have 60 printers deployed by group policy on a 2008 R2 level domain.

They are set as Group Policy Preferences in User configuration. They're all item level targeted to OUs and Security Groups containing Computers to give us the flexibility we require in our context.

At the moment, I have 57 separate policies. Most of these only contain one printer, some contain two. I set the policies up this way because I thought it would give us more flexibility... but now I think I may have been getting myself a tad confused :)

It would look cleaner in Group Policy if I only had 1 policy instead of 57. It would also allow me to add a "Delete All" with "Order 1".

My question is, how will this affect loading times etc? Are there any downsides to having 1 printer policy or is separate policies the better way to go?

turbonerd
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I don't have any "hard" data in regards to the processing overhead of doing it either way, so this answer is more opinion than fact, but it seems to me that having 57 different GPO's is a bit overkill. On the same hand, having a single policy may not be the best approach either.

I might suggest creating GPO's based on department or physical location. That will allow you to have a smaller number of GPO's without cramming them all into a single, monolithic GPO.

joeqwerty
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There could be.. If its not broken don't fix it? Other that what you have already stated, theres no real benfit of doing it either way. With group policy.

Davef
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  • The only other thing I can think of is that I would be able to use the Order function. With separate policies, how do I guarantee that a Delete All policy will be applied before the printer policies? – turbonerd Apr 26 '16 at 19:02